DSF

Hi Frazzle, In all honesty I'd get the printer from BMS, they do know a thing or 2 about sublimation printing plus you'll get the backup needed if there are problems etc.

Not associated with BMS and do not work for them, just a satisfied customer.

Sharon

Additional thought, if you have a flat press you could use the CG printer for heat transfer paper and add another feather in your cap.

Andrew;54474 wrote:Why can you not just replace the oem inks with the subli inks now? Why a new printer? Haven't read the whole thread and don't have a Ricoh myself but would have thought you just need to get the subli inks installed and through the system. Does it really waste that much ink? We never have the same kind of huge wastage with Epsons.

it is cheaper to buy another printer than to flush through with the proper ink.

draig;54475 wrote:Hi Frazzle, In all honesty I'd get the printer from BMS, they do know a thing or 2 about sublimation printing plus you'll get the backup needed if there are problems etc.

Not associated with BMS and do not work for them, just a satisfied customer.

Sharon

Additional thought, if you have a flat press you could use the CG printer for heat transfer paper and add another feather in your cap.

Just ordered one from Martin at BMS

frazzle;54477 wrote:it is cheaper to buy another printer than to flush through with the proper ink.

How? Not sure how this works out. Once you pull the ink through to the heads then you can print. You shouldn't really have to pull to much more through than when you initially introduce ink. A bit more of a clean to make sure there is no mixing once you have all colours through but that would be it I would have thought. Certainly all we ever do on the epsons.

Andrew, the Ricoh's have tubes that feed ink to the print heads from the cartridges & these do hold quite a bit of ink. If my memory serves me right I think it has been said the tubes hold about half a cartridge full of ink. It is a lot easier with the Epsons as the they don't have the tubes which makes it so much easier changing the cartridges over. The Brother printers are also similar to the Ricoh's with the tube feed system.

As you have already order another printer, you could clean through the other printer and use that as your back up, unless you intend to use the printer for its original use either way it would be silly just to let it go. In business mistake cost money.

jennywren;54482 wrote:As you have already order another printer, you could clean through the other printer and use that as your back up, unless you intend to use the printer for its original use either way it would be silly just to let it go. In business mistake cost money.

It wont be wasted my mrs can have it on her pc we would need to buy another one soon anyway.

I understand that Ian but you have to pull through the sublimation ink through the tubes regardless of whether there is current ink in there or not. Just need to pull a bit more through with current ink to make sure it is all pure subli ink.

All the epsons we do this on have the tube system so it's a similar thing we do. Just print off regular head cleans during the priming and print on a bit of metal to check when all heads are pulling through just fresh subli ink.

Andrew is right. The only ink you're "wasting" is the ink that's already in the lines - in other words, the ink you don't want.

The ink you do want has to fill the lines before it reaches the printhead, and this is the same whether the lines are full of old ink or full of air (i.e. "as new").

The same situation applies to Brother printers, and the Epson Workforce printers - or, indeed, any printer that has the inks remote-mounted. When I swap out inks on my Brother printers, I flush through with cartridges containing cleaning fluid first (so I can be sure the inks have flushed out okay) but, the last time I switched from pigment to dye, I didn't bother with the flushing.

Think of it like swapping out inks in a CISS. You flush out the bottles and the lines to get rid of the old ink, and then fill the bottles and the lines with the new ink. What have you wasted? Not the new ink - only the stuff you wanted to get rid of anyway.

There's a lot of FUD around about how much "expensive ink" you're going to "waste" when you swap out the cartridges, but the only ink you're wasting is ink you didn't want in there in the first place.

Well, we should all be happy that we do not have large format printers with swappable photographic and matte black inks. I think I read somewhere that a Canon wasted something like 40ml of ink everytime you had to swap black cartridges over and at retail costs of close on £130 for 330ml it makes swapping blacks an expensive past time.