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Guest
I forgot to add, the other small improvement made on the S80 vs the s50/s70 offerings was the take up reel dancer bar. It's WAY better - the s30/50/70 had these stupid weight things on the sides and it could cause tracking issues, the s80 has a lever designed dancer bar that works much better. I checked and we've printed well over 1,000,000 sq. ft. on the s80s we've had (the ones we have now are around 250K each and still have no missing nozzles and no issues - have had to replace some heads though) and I plan to get hopefully another 250K on each of them before replacing them (which is about another three years for us), this works out to around 1100 sq. ft. per machine per day (it ebbs and flows) but that's around 8-12 hours of running in an 8-pass HQ mode. If you run banner and stuff (we only run vinyl and canvas) you would be able to run a lower pass more and get more productivity out of it. We have no concerns of leaving the machines to print overnight - we rarely have headstrikes/ink drops/nozzle fallout and if we are really concerned we run a 12 or 16 pass mode knowing that it might be slower but there will be less chance for banding to show up.
We had HP latex in the past and it wasn't as good as the S80 for quality or color and we do almost exclusively wraps/wall murals so paneling prints was a big problem on the HP - we had shading and drift issues that we've never had on the S80s or any other epson (we had s70s and GS6000s). Speed might be faster on the HP now days, but when we owned both the HP and the Epsons we compared the two speed wise at what we visually considered similar quality print modes and the Epson was faster when running the HP at a mode that actually reached the similar quality of the Epson (quality is always just better on Epson).
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here are a screenshot and a photo showing the different pincher rollers (I had to use a screen shot from a youtube video as we don't have the S70s anymore), is this the same pinch wheel system you have (similar to a plotter pinch wheel/feeder system)? If so that was the issue we had with headstrikes and going to the continuous pinch wheel bar system on the S80s fixed all those issues.
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The few times we ran white ink (we have it on our UV printers so removed it from our Epsons) it wasn't very good, never had it on the HP so I can't compare it, but I would say the Epson S80 white is not good/never really found a need/demand for it.
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Finally, using scraps are difficult in the Epson as the printer wants back tension on the roll - so if you are running near the end of a roll you have to put tape on the panel being printed and run it down to the core on the back in feed media holder to make it "think" media is still attached to the core - since we typically get a lot of full roll/multi-roll jobs we will try to get every last inch printed and if you are not ready to pause the printer, cut the roll of 3m vinyl (other vinyls may work better, but 3M uses a strong enough tape that the printer can't pull the media off the empty core) and then run some extra tape (we use 2 inch blue tape from Uline - similar to paint/masking tape) then the printer will stop and you can lose your printed panel because it won't finish until you load a new roll in and it try's to finish on that other roll - which I've never found usable/sellable as there is no overlap - plus we sell our product for a premium so it would look cheap to have a small patch/scrap on a panel or print.
