• I want to thank all the members that have upgraded your accounts. I truly appreciate your support of the site monetarily. Supporting the site keeps this site up and running as a lot of work daily goes on behind the scenes. Click to Support Signs101 ...

Tell me the story of your printers

Hey everyone! I'm looking at all the pony's in my stable and trying to figure out which ones are on their last legs and which ones will gallop on with me. I did some googling to try and see if anyone had aggregated any information about how many feet their printer did before giving up the ghost and couldn't find much. I'm personally most interested in the Epson S80600 as I have one that is five years old and has steadily cranked out 100,000 feet of material for me and is still running well. So if anyone feels like joining in here's mine so far:

HP 570 - 80,000 feet but the last 20,000 the colour matching was brutal between panels for murals or even between stickers on mural runs. Constantly had to remove profiles/calibrate reinstall them. HP would tell us the heads were only good for 2,000ml of ink before needing changing vs the 5,000 they told us when we bought the machine. Service techs never really fixed the issues we had with it and we pretty much changed out every part in it. I knew every service tech they had. In Canada our supplier always supplied the ink with maybe 6 months of shelf life left on them. They blamed America for that one. Was about to send it to the chipper when some garage printer bought it off me for $9k.

Epson P9900 - This ten year old stallion just gave up the ghost. Magenta head won't print clean. not 100% sure on the footage will have to check on Monday. We had two of them and this was bought before the second one. Heads were hard to clean but other than that a nice ride.

Epson S80600 - 100,000 feet and counting. Had the silver ink before in the whatever it was the 7000 series? that machine wasn't too great but this one has been solid. Some banding from time to time usually solved with more passes. Make use of the white ink a few times a month and have a monster annual order where we order in every white ink cartridge in Canada and the western seaboard.

Epson P20000 - 45,000 feet and counting. About five years old. Great machine. Hard to clean the heads. When we had the 9900 as a redundancy was never too much of an issue but its a little sweating bullets now with the big orders wondering how much time we lose to cleaning heads.

Epson R5070 - 12,000 feet and counting. Not even a year old. Its pretty loud but so was the 570. Colour consistency has been great. We've had a few weird problems with banner material and the machine thinking its at the end of the roll and cancelling the print but other than that and some issues with buckling the vinyl on oracal we're really happy with it. Kind of annoying to cut it and get and the leader as you have to do it down low on the front. Doesn't require heads to be changed out like the 570 and in an epson first can be changed out by the user when required.

So pretty much all epson now. When I bought the 5070 they brought in the service tech and I told the dealer I hope i never see his (the service tech) face again. I hope I never know his name.
Might add the new canon prograf 4600 with their new inks if I'm feeling like being a guinea pig.
 
Top