I had a few diff latexs and then went solvent due to not liking the wasted 2 ft of material everytime I printed. My volume was low, so I got rid of it and went with a solvent.
I loved the solvent - nice prints, could print by wasting only 10" (I don't wear gloves, so if I print right at the edge I got hand marks), it was nice... But I really, really hate waiting 6 hours to laminate. It pretty much means I have to print one day and laminate the next.
90% of my orders are online, and I've become so busy that waiting a day is more of a pain than wasting a few bucks in material. Replying to this post made me realize that! And im going to be selling my Epson and going back to latex.
Both are great technologies. But since you've already used latex, you should really look up and compare them and see if moving away from latex is right for you.
You mentioned a lot of reprints to make sure the size fits perfectly... Would you be ok waiting at least a few hours after every print to do your sizing?
Not trying to convince you one way or the other, as I said... I like both technologies. I used to hate solvent be sure if a head dies you're out a few grand. But that's not so bad... I was.coming from a 8 head printer and had a realllllly bad 40k fix experience... I now know that was out of the norm, but even so, having user replaceable heads is a bonus to me.
As for the inkjet printers. I think most arcades are printed with inkjet... You get much, much higher quality printing on an object than you do on a solvent or latex. Think of an inkjet like your desktop printer... It's photo quality with no grainyness at all.
It can print on vinyl as mentioned, but the vinyl is a bit more expensive since it's a special vinyl.
Metallic and white inks -. My understanding is the metallic is more like a muddied silver... And it's rated for a few months only. As mentioned... White ink on solvents also isn't that good. Unless you're printing them every single day and have a niche use for them, they're not worth it.
have you done a cost.comparrison on how much it costs you to do your own vinyl? I know it seems expensive to outsource, but i think it'd be way cheaper unless you're restoring a dozen arcades a week.
There's nothing wrong with printing in house to have more control of your product, but 99.9% of the time in use cases like yours... You save a ton of money outsourcing. Heck .. there's a lot of people on here who's main job it is to sell vinyl and they outsource thousands of sqft a month, and still find that cheaper than buying a machine and upkeeping it.
So it might be smart to take a step back and see if replacing your printer is really worth it, especially since it seems to be working and you.only want to switch it to save cost on material / maintenance... But every single printer you buy will have compatible costs for upkeep... So spending a few grand on a new printer to save a few bucks on media seems counter productive
