Anyone seen this badboy lol

[Mugsman]

http://www.sublimationuk.com/equipment/ ... -7700.html :biggrin:

[Justin]

Why would you want to spend £480 on a 4 colour system when you could be using large format inks for a fraction of the costs? Also, you'd need a much larger heat press to take advantage of the increased size! lol.

They mention the 4880 as a close relative. I used to use one of those, bloody awful and my D88 outperformed a £3k printer

[pisquee]

you think a D88 is better than a 4880? Were you using the 4880 for sublimation or dye/pigment inks?
I'd love to hear more on this, as I'd certainly expect an Epson Pro wide format to outperform a small/domestic printer.

[Justin]

Yes, using them both for sublimation Side by side on occasions just to prove the point to my idiot boss. Our particular 4880 printer incredibly slowly which was the biggest problem, maybe software related but he never sorted it. The 8 colour system simply added no real benefits to the type of work we were printing, hence my frequent return to the D88 which would print so much quicker and perfectly acceptable quality.

Sure, the 4880 is (should be) a workhorse but in practice not so.

I currently run an S21, P50 and B1100. The P50 is by far the best printer but the difference in print quality between all 3 is negligible. The S21 is a crude, noisy 4 colour printer but time and time again I've printed test prints from all 3 only to be told by an impartial bystander that the S21 print is the best!

I've heard so many times over the years...and years that sublimation doesn't justify any more than 4 colours. Personally I do prefer a 6 colour system but the vast majority of users are happy with 4. Most authorised systems use 4 colours now, both sizes of Ricoh for example.

Spending time getting the profile right for each printer has proved extremely beneficial. Two printers of the same make and model may not print the same and in an ideal world should both have their own profile made. The profile provided with authorised systems is usually ok but is a bit of a 'best case' scenario for this very reason. If you have a custom profile made I'd be surprised if you saw no positive difference.

[Andrew]

We've got a 4880 and it's great. Fast with decent prints. It largely comes down to software with sublimation. In the old days we had 1290's. First of all we had them on sublijet with powerdriver software which was dreadful, then we switched to artainium and there was no comparrison. Best printer we have had is probably the 1800 with sublijet but I guess that's purely down to the software was spot on.

[Justin]

Yeah, ours was through the powerdriver, I suspected that was where the issue lay.

[Andrew]

We used the powerdriver lite for the 1800 and we had perfect colours for every type of design on one setting and it was extremely fast. The 1290 powerdriver was completely opposite. It's very hit and miss with these softwares. With the 4880 we use the standard driver and have tweaked the settings to suit. We also had Paul do us a profile a while back for the 4000.