What equipment do I need

[Dee Dee]

I'm fairly new to sublimation. I have an epson 4880 and I'm looking to get all the necessary equipment for it. What are the best sublimation inks? Paper? I'm looking into mug/t shirt sublimation on a small scale and then to grow from there.
Any suggestions/tips/advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Renniwano]

I suggest making a cuppa (or two) and reading through the forum..

There will be many different answers to who finds what paper/inks etc the best..

The search button *top right of the forum* will assist with specifics as these have been answered numerous times

[Justin]

Is that the 8 colour Epson printer? Great printer but pretty much overkill for small scale work. 8 x Inks are going to cost you a fair bit initially. Has the printer been used or brand new?

[pisquee]

Excellent professional quality printer, having the range of colours will give you better print results, but depending on the type of artwork you are doing, as Justin says, may be overkill.
We've got 7 colour wide format sublimation printer, and see a definite benefit of the light black, light cyan, and light magenta, over the 4 colour printers for our work - you gain the light light black ink, which is one up on us, but this does limit you in terms of sublimation ink suppliers, as not many do the light light black.

[smo]

Well instead of making you search, i'll give my recommendations:

We use Sawgrass Ink in our printers and print onto Trupix paper. You'll find opinions vary from person to person and printer to printer but that works for us. Even more controversial is the media onto which people print, so many suppliers and options!!

[Dee Dee]

Thank u for your help. The printer is 3 years old and hasn't been used much. I will check those brands. I think sourcing the inks has been my problem. Not too many companies provide inks for epson 4880. I'll keep looking. Thanks!

[Justin]

If I remember correctly, those printers have quite long ink tubes (I may be wrong) If this is the case you'll need to make sure all the old ink is flushed through....again, if memory serves there may well be a flush function on these machines? I used a 4800 a few years ago but I'm a little rusty now

[pisquee]

In Service Menus, there is INIT FILL - this flushes the lines, dampers and heads out to the maintenance tank, and refills the lines with what is in the carts.

Another thing you can do is turn off the ink counters, so that if you go the refillable cartridge route (which can be anything up to around 450ml each) then you can just keep topping them up, and not need to remove them to reset the chips. You'll still need the chip resetter though for when you empty the maintenance tank to resuse it though.