So we've been printing a few jobs on the printer. I would like to be printing more white ink, but over the years we've conditioned our customers to not think of dark shirts when looking for a full color print. So it's up to us to re-educate them.
CMYK Printing:
The machine can function like a CMYK printer with no white ink, which is nice because in head cleanings it will not clean the white heads and waste ink. The prints are faster because of a few redesigns. Nothing majorly different, but it is a little faster. The best part is the ink is cheaper. If you bought the oversized cartridges for the GT541, ink was about $.75 a cc, with this machine it is $.56. Most larger designs use less than 1cc of ink, I think the average for all prints was around .6cc. So with the new machine our average cost per print would be around $.33.
The colors are slightly better and you can turn the machine up to 1200dpi from 600 and get better colors, but the print time is increased.
with the proper pretreat, you can print on poly shirts, and the prints are really vivid and hold up very well. Very similar to sublimation.
White ink printing:
This is where it's tricky. The most important part of white ink printing is the pretreat. If it isn't fully cured and evenly applied in the correct amount, your prints will suffer. I thought it was a one size fits all approach...it isn't. Different garments need different amounts of pretreat. Cheaper shirts like the 2000's need a little more, where the ringspun shirts need less.
White ink runs about $.45 per cc. Most designs we've been running use a total of about $1.50 in ink, and just like screen printing, you put less color on top of white, so it uses less CMYK ink on darks. Sounds like a lot, and it is, except we aren't trying to print 300 pcs on this thing. The sweet spot for us is around 36 pcs. I have spent the last few days running samples for customers that ordered digital prints in the past on lights and trying to get them to come to the dark side.
Most of the white prints we print at 1200dpi. It prints a little slower, but it puts down more ink in a single pass. All of the prints we've done so far are single pass. A left chest white ink print takes about 30-45 seconds, a full chest or full back takes about 3 minutes or so. It's by no means going to set any speed records, but it's not designed to.
Maintenance:
This is more than I thought it would be. White ink is tough. The TO2 particles don't like to stay in suspension, so they settle out...in the tubes, in the heads, and in the carts. There are built in cleaning cycles in the machine that help combat this, but you still have to flush the white periodically. I don't recommend running a couple white ink shirts a day, it's better to group them together. Right now on days we are not printing, I leave cleaning solution in the heads. That is easily flushed and keeps the heads from clogging with white. I press a couple buttons and the machine loads the white and we are off and running. Brother Japan has a horrendous cleaning regimen, Brother USA redeveloped it and cut out most of the cleanings...saving about 80% of the costs.
I personally wouldn't get a white ink machine without a pretreat machine. We have been running the Viper XPT (not built by Brother) and it's killer. Totally programmable to get the right amount of pretreat in the right spot. Pretreat can be nasty stuff, so this machine has to be flushed at the end of the running cycle. Again, the screen prompts you on how to do the cleaning. The body is all plastic, which is fine because pretreat can rust metal. I see why they did this.
If I had to do it over again, I would in a heartbeat. I had almost 100k prints on our last machine and I look to put more than that on this one.
