new to di sub-Which Ricoh should I use for start-up

[JackB]

I have seen first hand what somebody produced using cheap inks and cheap equipment, and their sales soon withered. that is why with the advice of a couple of the forum members we went for the Ricoh Gx700 with Sawgrass inks and the Adkins swing and mug presses.
The mugs and T shirts that we are printing are outstanding compared to what the other person (no names no pack drill) were churning out. My son inlaw showed some examples to the organiser of a gig taking place next week and he siaid produce as much as you can and whatever does not sell he will buy personally. Plus we have had several orders of facebook. ( Not bad for the first week).
We may try some of Coralgraphs products as they seem to get good reports by forum members.

Jack.

[bms]

I have nothing against epson's printers - epsons are the main sub printers and I consider the ricoh's as the minority - but at this stage the Ricoh's are my favourite after owning both - although my epson wasn't printing sub inks. Paul, I was kidding and it was meant as tongue in cheek What I'm trying to say is the people who are selling mugs on ebay, for that price, are devaluing the trade. The only way these traders can do this is by having zero overheads and buying cheap inks as the profit made selling at that price wouldn't get them a full set of ricoh carts. Without fake inks the cowboy traders wouldn't exist - they couldn't afford to compete without putting their prices up as the next time a red light comes on, on the printer, they wouldn't have enough money to fill the inks up again. They buy cheap gear, cheap inks, sell a few boxes of cheap mugs, with the help of this forum with any problems that may arise, then realise how little they are making. 5 - 6 months down the road and the whole system ends up on ebay for sale to the next punter and the damage has been done.As for the vat on fake ink - anybody selling unauthorised sub ink is hardly likely to be vat reg.

I don't disagree with any of that re the vat though, they may not be vat registered, but that means they can't reclaim the vat paid on the ink in the first place so this won't make much difference to final costs, but the general principle of what you say is fair points.

[Paul]

fair enough John
But I can not agree with all you say about cowboys...
few years a go when Chinese ink was only in storys (on very popular sublimation forum runed by one of now not-existing suppliers) but no one ever seen it and no one ever try this so most people used to use only artanium. you still had a clowns then on eaby who was selling mugs for £3.99
And I know they used artanium inks!
So I know wat you are comming from John! but before chinese inks you still find like you said cowboys with no overheads who was undercutinhg they prices only to get sales on ebay.
I must say now when I look on ebay (I do it every day) every day I can see some unbranded inks for sale. brand new in large quantity. this listings going to the end of the listing time. lt say 3 years a go sawgrass never let no one sell ink on ebay. every auction that was listing unbranded subli ink was removed in 24h! so it looks like they dont care to much at the moment


wow... I hope you know what I wanted to say as even I dont understand most of this post lol! sorry. cant write any better

[JSR]

Yes, but the cost of the ink going onto the mug isn't hugely different. At 14p (using the figures below) for Sawgrass ink in a Ricoh GX3300 (cheaper per ml for the GX5050) then the absolute max difference in ink cost is 14p!

I agree with you that on a print-per-print cost, the ink isn't the sole price factor here. I've said before that Sawgrass ink is actually significantly cheaper than OEM ink.

However, it's the perception that's the problem. When you're running low on ink, you're invariably running low on more than one colour. When four colours run out around the same time, that's £240 you have to find at least. That's a huge chunk of money if you don't have it. Cheap non-authorised ink might cost a quarter or less than that - so for the cost of just one ink, you could have all four. That's what they call a no-brainer.

The main problem is in the way Sawgrass ink is sold. You can't buy smaller quantities than 125ml, so there's no way to offset the cost. If inks were sold in 30ml or 60ml bottles, buying it in wouldn't be the huge wallet-tugger that it currently is.

[JSR]

I have seen first hand what somebody produced using cheap inks and cheap equipment, and their sales soon withered.

The trouble is that it's difficult to generalise like that.

Some time back I posted a review to experiment with using a Brother printer with giant size ink tanks. Each ink cartridge holds around 100ml of ink, and it takes 4 inks. Due to the unique way that Sawgrass sells their ink, I would have had to pay £240 just for the ink to use in this experiment. With the risks involved (it might not have worked and I could have ended up with £240 of ink on my carpet), there was no way I could justify that kind of expense with using the "authorised" ink, so I sought out a cheaper alternative.

To cut a long story short, I did a comparison between a 4-ink printer using Sawgrass Artainium ink and the 4-ink Brother using someone else's ink. The result:



The above photo was taken at 11pm at night with camera flash and overhead "economy" bulb, but I can assure you that the quality of print was *identical* between the two mugs. Different printers, different inks, and you just cannot tell the difference.

As I said on that review and I'll repeat here, I'm not an advocate of "cheap" inks (which is why I'm not going to say where they came from) but this experiment proved to me that cheap ink can produce just as good quality as "authorised" ink - which is why I say it's important not to generalise. Clearly the person who printed the items you saw didn't use the same ink but, had they done so, you might have made a different decision.

[JSR]

Chinese ink

This phrase always amuses me. How do we know that "authorised" ink doesn't come from the same sources?

A few years back, when I was casually looking into cheap dye ink, there were many rumours around that a lot of the "good" sources of cheap dye ink came from exactly the same factories as the "official" ink sold by the likes of Epson, HP, Canon, etc. The only difference is that they didn't have the OEM brand on them, and so they were about one-tenth of the cost.

I don't know how true that is, but it has always made me think. Those factories are making this ink - how easy it would be to let a little slip out the back door. After all, it isn't the factory making the huge profits on the high markup of the product that's sold to the end-user - it's the OEM (the middle man between the factory and the end user) that's making the vast profits. Whether the factory sells the ink to the OEM or sneaks it out the door and sells direct, they'd be making the same profits.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

[SciArtImages]

As ever, thinking aloud. So if I were to sell to a customer the following (which is what we do after all, sell - not tell them the intricate details of ink):
a) a really cheap deal with non-dishwasher proof mugs and unknown ink, which may or may not impress the customer after a few months;
b) properly priced with the quality I would want, more expensive but I would be happy with it lasting.
Would a customer be best pleased with a or b (presuming that they, like I, would like to do repeat business)?
I would imagine there are a lot of different answers out there - mine to be honest is to give the best quality I can at the best price. Quality first.

Neil.

[Paul]

Neil. Quality will be this same. If you use unbranded ink on good quality mug quality of ptint will be same as with branded ink. Look jsr photo.

[John G]

When I first started I used xpres mugs and was happy with the results, then to save a bit money I bought cheap mugs off lovecut and had the same quality of print. A year later one of my 1st sales came back to me and told me that the the mug they bought didn't have a print on now - it had totally washed off to the point where you couldn't make out what the print was. I did state at the time of sale that these mugs weren't dishwasher proof but offered a half price replacement. The customer did buy but I felt terrible charging him again - so lesson learned, I only use mugs off xpres and bms that state they are dishwasher proof. I've received samples off Henry at Coralgraph but they are still getting wash tested at the moment.

Back to the inks - there could be another theory about cheap sales, nothing to do with fake ink though. If you have a wide/large format printer you can buy litres of ink at a reduced price compared to the prices we are paying for small qty's - could peeps be filling up their systems with ink that was destined for wide/large format machines?

Funny how this thread has strayed a bit:redface:

[Paul]

yes john! agree 100% quality blank is diferent story :)you ca use dogs b*** inks for 100's of £££ and use crap mug few months later picture will be gone