Can someone help me decide please?

[Dowster]

I am the most indecisive person ever so hoping you guys can help, please.

I used to have a Ricoh running ink4inkjet inks, had it years and it finally went to printer heaven.

So then we purchased a Sawgrass SG500 running their inks, problem is I am spending a small fortune on their inks.

Do I:

A: Get some filled cartridges from eBay (or similar) but chancing an icc wont exist (I think I've already talked myself out of this option).
B: Get some empty cartridges and fill them myself with either i4i or Ink Experts ink (is this plausible?)
C: Buy a new Ricoh from Dye Sublimation Supplies and use their ink (Prima)
D: Buy a new Ricoh from Dye Sublimation Supplies and use empty cartridges and fill them myself with either i4i or Ink Experts ink

I am open to any other ideas too.

Thanks so much for any help.

[Justin]

You'll never get consistency ordering cheap ink and carts off eBay unless the seller will guarantee this and can provide specific profiles.
Yes, you could fill carts yourself, most will recommend Sublinova inks, tried, tested, well priced.
Of course you can buy a new Ricoh. IMO I wouldn't as I never rated the print quality and running costs. I wouldn't bother trying to save money by filling the carts personally on a Ricoh.
My advice would be to look at buying an Epson from Ink Experts, Ink Express etc. that is supplied with Sublinova inks and the correct profile.
Do you need A3 or A4? You will notice a huge saving ink ink costs, did I say huge? Well, it will be huge and the results will be better and more consistent.

[Dowster]

You'll never get consistency ordering cheap ink and carts off eBay unless the seller will guarantee this and can provide specific profiles.
Yes, you could fill carts yourself, most will recommend Sublinova inks, tried, tested, well priced.
Of course you can buy a new Ricoh. IMO I wouldn't as I never rated the print quality and running costs. I wouldn't bother trying to save money by filling the carts personally on a Ricoh.
My advice would be to look at buying an Epson from Ink Experts, Ink Express etc. that is supplied with Sublinova inks and the correct profile.
Do you need A3 or A4? You will notice a huge saving ink ink costs, did I say huge? Well, it will be huge and the results will be better and more consistent.

You know, I'd not actually thought about changing to Epson... I think because I've heard negative things about them. Definitely something I will look into though, thanks.

[Justin]

Not sure what you'e heard about Epson but I guess everyone has differetn experiences. We run 4 different Epsons on a daily basis. We've had Ricoh in the dark and very distant past, I know some people stil swear by them, personally we swore at them

[pw66]

You know, I'd not actually thought about changing to Epson... I think because I've heard negative things about them.

The negative things you have heard about Epson probably stem from comments about Epson's own sub printers such as the F100. Some people have found colour matching to be problematic.

There are plenty of non sub specific Epsons that are ideal for conversion to sublimation. All you will need is an ICC profile tailored to the ink/printer/paper combination that you have and you will need to get used to printing direct from your design software.

Price depends on print quality you need, but an A4 printer can range from about £180 for a four colour ecotank up to £350 for a six colour photo quality printer.
A3 printers range from about £170 ( if you are happy to use refillable carts) up to about £600 for a six colour photo quality ecotank. Those prices are if you source the printer yourself and don't include sub ink - expect to pay an extra £100 if you buy a ready to go setup. You can offset some of the cost of sublimation ink by selling the ecotank bottles on ebay.

Ink prices are worlds apart. Sublinova ink works out at less than £100 per litre. Sawgrass cartridges work out at about £1400 per litre... the cost of four sawgrass carts is more than the cost of a new Epson A4 ecotank.

[gazfocus]

A few things to think about…

The Sawgrass SG500 cannot run with third party inks because the firmware doesn’t like custom ICC profiles. Yes, you can technically print with the profile, but it intentionally blows out certain colours making it unusable.

Second thing to think about is what you’re going to be printing. We print mainly mugs. Up until a couple of years ago, we printed 3 mugs to an A4 sheet on Epson ecotanks.

We switched to single ‘mug sized’ sheets so that we could print closer to the handles and also to protect more of the mug from coming into contact with our silicone wraps. It also has the benefit of making the sheets easier to line up on the mug for our staff members rather than having to gauge the gap either side of the handle (a small thing I know).

When we switched to mug sized sheets, we found that the Epson ecotanks could not feed the sheets through straight. We bought a brand new high end Ecotank (£800+ for an A4 one) and it still didn’t feed straight even out of the box. We switched to an SG500 and have had no issues with feeding straight at all.

The other thing was the speed at which the Epsons wore out. Mainly rollers and things but we would only generally get 6 months or so out of a printer (ok, we do work them hard…printing 4-6 hours non stop every day), and each time we changed printer model, we had to send off for a new ICC profile. In comparison our SG500 has been running for almost 2 years and has printed 100k mugs and is still going strong.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a fan of the colours from the SG500 and found sublinova and inkforinkjet inks much nicer with the correct profile, but for me printing straight was more important.

Next on my list is one of the new Ricoh SG3210’s with third party ink and see how that goes but for the time being, the SG500 is still going strong.

[nibz33]

Just catching up on this and appreciate your thoughts, I'm still using the Ricoh 3110 with mug sized sheets and was starting to look for an A3 so that I could combine our main business of mugs with printing a small amount of photography products. I'm glad I saw this as I definitely would not want to go back to cutting A4 sheets down to size.
I really hope there is a decent A3 printer out there that can print mug paper straight, do you know if the SG1000 prints mug paper straight? I know it's not going to match colour quality of the Epson's but it would be a foot in the door for my other stuff.