What are the advantages of using Brother printers over Epson and/or Ricoh?
The main advantage is in comparison to the Epson printers. There's less advantage over the Ricoh other than printer cost.
The problem with Epson printers is that we have only two options for dye-sub use. The most widely used option is to use a CISS with tubes flapping about all over the place, for which you have to remove parts of the printer to fit. No foresight is put into the supported options to support more than one printer per CISS even if there are readily available cartridges that will fit into several printers. The second option is to use refillable cartridges but, because these are mounted on the print delivery mechanism, it's difficult to refill them in situ (frequent removing/replacing leads to air trapped in the print head) and that they only hold about 9ml of ink - which runs out way too quickly.
Another problem with using Epson printers is the chips on the cartridges. Although we have convenient auto-reset chips these days, that in itself is costly. Each time a chip "auto-resets" it tricks the printer into thinking that you've changed the cartridge. This initiates the "charging" process in which all of the inks are drained of a little ink. If that happens to all four or six cartridges one after the other, your cartridges will be empty before you know it.
The reasons for looking at Brother printers was to make up for the shortcomings of the Epson printers - to do away with the CISS, to eliminate the "auto-reset chip" business, and to overcome the thimble-sized cartridge restrictions. Brother printers (like the Ricoh) use remote-mounted inks which, as we shall see, overcomes all of these issues.
Which Brother printer to use, and why?
The printer chosen needed to be (i) as cheap as possible - cheaper than the current supported Epson model B40W, and (ii) practical.
I chose the Brother DCP-195C which is available for under £60 from Amazon.co.uk. There are cheaper Brother printers around but the reason for going for this model will be explained shortly.
The cartridges to be used came from www.printercartridges.net. These are high-capacity cartridges that hold 65-70ml of ink in each colour cartridge and 100ml of ink in the black cartridge. Those capacities are higher than some CISS bottles.
The cartridges chosen can be used in any Brother printer that's compatible with LC980 or LC1100 cartridges. There are several printers, both A4 and A3, that fall into this category. The DCP-195C chosen for this experiment normally takes LC980 cartridges and that's why it was picked over the cheaper models.
There are other advantages to using a Brother printer over an Epson. For the same (or lower) cost, you get more for your money. The DCP-195C is £40 cheaper than the Epson B40W yet it comes with a scanner and card reader/USB-stick functions. The Brother printer also uses an internal paper tray - which protects unused paper from dust and avoids the need to have flimsy paper support trays. The paper tray supports A4, Letter, and Legal (8.5"x14") paper - and, of course, smaller sizes.
Due to the internal paper tray, the printer can be handily placed under a shelf if you don't intend to use the scanner much.
The Brother printer has a single line LCD screen to show status and to allow you to perform many standalone functions much easier than you would with an Epson printer (such as printing nozzle patterns, performing a headclean, or scanning to an SD card).
If network printing is important to you, you will need to look at a more expensive printer because this one is USB-only.
Printer build quality and reliabilty
This is the issue behind Sawgrass not supporting Brother printers. Initial comparisons with Epson printers are quite favourable. The DCP-195C is no worse than the Epson B40W as far as build quality is concerned. In some areas it's actually better because there are no extended paper support trays sticking out all over the place waiting to be caught or broken. The expanding paper tray is a little less substantial than I would have liked, but it's an improvement over older Brother printers.
Reliability is something that can only be determined over time. The printhead is less accessible than it is on an Epson printer which may prove to be an issue if you have dried ink clogging a printhead. That said the £60 cost of the printer is in the same ballpark as replacing printheads on a printer that has replaceable printheads anyway.
Set-up
Here is the printer set up with the new inks in the refillable cartridges -
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[/center]You can see the cartridges sticking out of the printer. Unlike with the thimble-sized refillable cartridges in an Epson printer, you can easily see how low the inks are getting. On the black and the magenta cartridges, you can see the side of them. For the two in the middle, you can just make out the ink level at the edge of the cartridge.
Noticeable are the coloured bungs that are in free air - making them easy to remove to allow for topping-up of the cartridges while still in the printer. I've no idea how Brother monitors the ink levels because, as mentioned, the cartridges do not have chips. However, I intend to top up the cartridges as convenient - not just when they run out.
I should stress here that for the purposes of this experiment I did not use Artanium ink. I'm normally a strong advocate of "supported ink" and would not wish for anyone to think that I'm recommending that you should switch. However, four colours of Artanium ink would have cost £240 and that's a little bit steep for a simple experiment that may not have worked (I didn't particularly want £240 of ink to leak out over my floor if it didn't work).
Results
Due to the fact that I'm using an unsupported printer with unsupported ink there is the issue of a colour correction profile. This is simply not available and so I used Paul's helpful profiling gadget to profile the printer with the inks.
My first test mug came out as follows -
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[/center]The mug on the left is the one I printed from my B40W using Artanium inks after profiling it with Paul's gadget. The one on the right is the DCP-195C using alternative inks after profiling it with the same device. (Photos were taken 11pm at night with a flash and one of those useless economy bulbs overhead, so they're not as good as they might be.)
Next to each other they look very similar. If I was to be hypercritical I would say that the mug from the Brother printer has a minor red bias - this may be due to a different colour gamut in the inkset or just my inexperience with creating profiles. Quality wise there is no difference. There's no banding, no visible dots or dithering.
The Epson printer, after profiling, require their images to be lightened quite a bit before printing (+10 on the "Brightness" setting in Qimage will do the job) - suggesting that reprofiling may be in order. However, the Brother print required no further adjustment. The mug shown is a direct print via Qimage using the profile and then pressed to a mug.
Set-up issues
The only issue when setting up the printer was due to no readily available instructions. For some moments I had a concern that the printer couldn't recognise the ink cartridges. This came down to which order you insert the cartridges. These cartridges are larger than normal which means that you can't close the cartridge door. The Magenta cartridge has a special tab on it to fool the printer into thinking the door is shut. If you insert the Magenta cartridge before the others, the printer can't detect the cartridges because it thinks the door is shut. All you need to do is to insert the cartridges from left-to-right (Black, Yellow, Cyan, and finally Magenta) to avoid this issue.
Running issues
I am experiencing a recurring issue with the cyan ink. While printing a page there is no problem, but after the printer is left idle for a few minutes, the nozzle line is missing some blocks. I believe this is a vacuum issue with the cyan cartridge. Everything is fine while the printer is sucking ink out of the cartridge but as soon as the printing stops, the vacuum effect pulls the ink back into the cartridge leaving a poor ink nozzle check print. The issue is much reduced by removing the bung on the cartridge to allow air into the cartridge more easily when printing - which suggests the issue is with the cartridge, not the printer (I actually have the same issue with the cyan ink on my supported Easyflow system with my Epson 1400 printer, so it's not unique). The other cartridges do not suffer this problem so it may just be a one-off.
Disadvantages
1. The paper tray isn't very capacious (it'd probably only hold about 100 sheets or so) so it's only really suitable for the low-volume user.
2. Printing using the settings I've chosen (Paper set to "inkjet paper" and quality set to "photo") is incredibly slow compared to a modern Epson printer. However, at this price, it may be feasible to buy in multiple set-ups to (i) increase speed, and (ii) to have backup printer options. I haven't tried using the faster print settings (normally on an Epson printer we set to "plain paper" for faster printing) but I may do if I get the time.
3. You need to create your own colour correction profile or have someone create one for you. I haven't used this set-up with Artanium ink yet, so unless anyone wants to donate £240 of Artanium ink so that I can do so, there's no point asking me for my ICC profile.
Conclusions
This first experience with using a Brother printer for dye-sublimation has, I feel, been a positive one. It has been proven that Brother printers can be used in place of Epson/Ricoh printers and that the quality of output is more than acceptable. Long-term use still needs to be analysed.
It's only really the print-speed that should give anyone reservations. More expensive Brother printers are likely to be a little faster (my A3 MFC-5890CN seems faster when printing photos although I haven't tried using that for dye-sub).
On the whole, this has been a rewarding experiment that proved what it set out to prove. I can only hope that, sometime in the future, Sawgrass revisits Brother printers that use these large ink cartridges as, besides the print-speed, the ease of set-up, quality of print, and price makes Brother an inexpensive and more convenient alternative to Epson printers for dye-sub use.
I hope this review has been of interest to someone and I hope that I've been fair in weighing up the pros/cons of using this printer. If you have any questions, post them here and I'll do my best to reply to them. Please do not ask where I got my alternative ink from because I won't tell you in this thread.
Always interesting to see alternative products and ideas being tested.
