Hi, through some great help/advice on here already, I have purchased my vinyl cutter and heat press is on the way.
I have an order in for some tees and hoodies with mixed substrate (images attached), they will have vinyl cut lettering on them, but also need 2 full colour images on them ! and this is the problem I am trying to sort out....
I am researching printers, been looking at the Epson 1500w which by all accounts can be set up for sublimation and a CISS.
This will be my first printer purchase and my question is, could I use one printer to sublimate, then swap the inks over, run a few blanks few and pop inkjet inks in for if I want to use print flex or paper transfer?
thank you
I have to disagree on being able to switch to sublimation inks temporarily on your printer,
absolutely you can switch. But the question is
should you do that.
With a CIS it is a little more difficult. It also may be more expensive and some ink waste as the carts when changed over will initiate an automatically head clean.
I have had many Epson desktops over the years and use refillable carts, I can swap easily between pigment inks and sub inks.
With the CIS the carts for those are held on inks lines and some hardware mounting on those lines, so you would need a way to secure the removed CIS carts while you have the other carts installed until you are done using the other carts. So swapping from CIS to refillable carts is possible, but not as easy as refillable carts to refillable carts.
Note that on Epson that are designed to have small carts (such as the 1500W) the previous inks in the system are completely purged and replaced by the new inks in the cart that was replaced.
The carts travel with the print heads and sit directly above the heads. There are no ink lines to the print head so there only exists a very small amount of inks in the actual print head and will be displaced once a new cart is sensed and the firmware performs an auto head clean ... the old inks are completely "rinsed" out this way.
Note: Not all Epsons can do this, on larger formats there are fixed position carts and long link lines that is expensive to purge, and a few of the newer Epson workforce desktop models also use fixed position and larger carts and long ink lines, the 1500W is not one of those types. Ricoh printers also have fixed location and larger carts, along with connecting ink lines.
If you were to only need to switch
occasionally it may be advantageous to switch carts on demand, cheaper than running a second printer. Technically there is no reason you can't. The negatives of this is that with the CIS you have to set the CIS carts aside and secure them somehow when you swap long enough to swap in and use the refillable carts. It also will use more inks for the auto head cleans. Plus the time involved to swap carts.
Also, if you use inks for regular paper transfers those should be pigment inks for the best washing, and not dye inks similar to what your printer used originally from the factory.
