Bloody hell, I didn't think it would take this long of having these printers and getting them up and running - If I'd realised I may not have bothered, but glad now I did.
At first we got a 'cheap' refill cart set from China (Ali) that you have to take the original Epson ships off their carts, and install them under a small circuit board on the refill cart - after many attempts I couldn't get this working, and gave up. Don't get this type, as I wasted so much time on it.
The 9600 printers we currently have in play, the refill carts just work, so it's been an eye-opener how easy life has been with 9600 models which just keep plodding on regardless!
Eventually, I came across this system:
Which is much more pricey, but as it uses actual Epson carts and chips it seemed more likely it was going to actually work, and I liked the idea of the big tanks, although it did remind a bit of going back to an Epson 1400 with CISS, just on a much bigger scale!
To get the first system working, we needed Epson carts, and the first printer didn't come with a full set (some were compatibles) so we got another printer cheap on Ebay just for the carts!
In all the time of faffing trying to get the cheap system working, the Cyan channel/head buggered, and wouldn't print, even after being flushed through with cleaning solution and soaked over night etc, so the "spare" we bought for the carts being in storage elsewhere had survived, and so this was put into use instead.
With memories of using CISS with small printers many years ago, and the dirty fingers, ink splashes on clothes, and spillages on the floor, this was no different but on a bigger scale, including overflowing a waste tank I hadn't realised I'd reset ages ago, but not emptied!) and a line from the CISS tank not been fully mated at one the joints. Also, on the first printer, one night, it decided to dump all of the cyan tank of ink, through the head and onto the floor, after it was left soaking on a paper towel of cleaning fluid!
This one now has a slight fault on the yellow head, where some of the photo black ink is coming across into it, so in the end, I've filled the photo black channel with yellow ink too, and flushed through, so that you can't tell. We we select Matte papers in the print driver, the photo black won't get used, so won't cause a problem. If this problem hadn't been there, I would have that channel filled with cleaning fluid.
So, after what must be a year at least of faffing with these printer, and one bust (although I may get round to getting a screw driver in there to get the head and dampers out to see if replacing the dampers and flushing the head through manually clears the problem.) We have a working 64" sublimation paper along with our 64" rotary press!
Just need to get InkTec to ship us some 64" rolls of their paper, and get all our the ICCs redone.
Here she is, with a spare 92cm width roll we had in the warehouse
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I love colour swatches and would quite happily have cushions made up from them.