Smoke_Jaguar
Man who touches printers inappropriately.
UJV300DTF-75
The Mimaki UJV300DTF-75 UV-DTF Roll-to-Roll is the company’s first purpose-built UV-DTF (direct-to-film) printer, designed to easily produce vibrant, durable transfers for curved or uneven surfaces using a dedicated film system.
www.mimakiusa.com
Looks like Mimaki is finally catching up with UVDTF printing with a rebranded UCJV300-75 with an extra take-up roll for the adhesive backer removal and laminating rollers. Seems the inks are modified LH100 for white/clear and LUS-170 for color, unsure if that's just the same base inks or if they're modified for the application. The other change is pretty interesting, using non-stick rollers to clamp the glue side of the A sheet. A couple of novel ideas, so I will give them credit there.
Now, the price, that's bonkers. $29,995 as of writing it. Compare that to the UCJV300 at $23,095 for the 160 series, with a cutter as well. Seems going to 24" wide from 60" and removing the cutter, but a few additions for the process. $7900 more seems a tad ridiculous. I like Mimaki's ecosystem, and I think UVDTF has some real potential. However, the use of the UCJV300 platform seems incredibly dumb. UVDTF benefits from staggered heads, white takes the lead, color head in middle and clear for the end of the process. Specs seem to show they're still using 2 Gen5 4 channel heads, color and white/clear. No staggering means you're going to have a CRAZY slow print doing 3 layers.
Specs as listed:
Draft 300 x 600 8Pass 34.4 ft2/h (3.2 m²/h)
High Speed 300 x 900 12Pass 26.9 ft2/h (2.5 m²/h)
Production 600 x 600 16Pass 22.6 ft2/h (2.1 m²/h)
Quality 600 x 1200 32Pass 10.76 ft2/h (1 m²/h)
High Quality 1200 x 1200 32Pass 6.5 ft2/h (0.6 m²/h)
Dual XP600 (head 1 white, head 2 color/clear) printhead Chinese $2800 printers run about 1.2 m²/h at 720*1080DPI to give a bargain basement comparison.
As for the market, we run a 4-head (TX800, 1 white, 2 color and 1 clear head) printer that sells for about $3800 new, and we get close to 3m²/h with only about 12" width. Not a ton of demand for UVDTF as of late, but people who are introduced to it and given samples tend to really like the output.
For a $30,000 printer, I have to wonder if you'll ever even reach a break-even with other machines that can do a faster job for, in some cases, a tenth the price. I understand support is important in pricing of commercial printers, but that seems really hard to justify unless they maybe do a buy one, get 2 free deal.
Seeing as we basically had the same situation with the standard textile DTF TX150P/300P printer that was just a JV150/300 using old 1440/DX7 heads that was painted blue and given a new ink-set, it seems we're seeing more rebranding than innovation. Not really expecting miracles or anything but seems like markup was the goal over all else. Even using old CE4 heads like the UJF30/6042 MKII series would've been amazing. 4 dual channel heated heads, stagger white and color, and you'd have a machine that'd rip.
As someone who likes a lot of Mimaki's offerings, I can't help but wonder if they've changed leadership or are just phoning it in with these offerings.