I started buying the EZ frames in 09' and bought about 10 at a time to get our inventory up without killing us financially. The tension levels between like mesh counts are really close, within 2 newtons of each other so all of our 156's have settled in at 30-32 newtons after several years of use. I love the lack of maintenance that the ez's require and they work great with most everything you'd want to print. I'd certainly not mind having a shop full of them but I've got about 150 newmans right now and only 75 being good and in production, the rest of them need to be cleaned and stretched. I really like the ez's, but for the higher end work I always lean on the newmans because they are just better in every category except maintenance.
If your shop doesn't have the time to deal with newmans then the ez's will be a much better option than statics. I know our shop has really benefitted from higher tension screens and the debate about statics versus retens/high tension frames will always rage on. The benefits of high tension screens may not be that noticeable to some shops, others won't print without them, it's pretty shop specific. I know that I struggle setting jobs up with 15 newton screens and I have to add significantly to the print pressure and when I do that, it screws up everything else I'm trying to do. If we did a ton of light colored garments or just discharge WB prints then I'd probably lean towards a screen that is maintenance free because I don't think tension is as big of a variable to control when doing that type of work. Now when printing on darks with plastisol ink, I think that screen tension is the difference between a great print and one that simply finds it's way into the box and out the door.
One of the reasons why I'm one of those guys who pushes high tension is because I've seen the difference from going from static alums to newman/shurloc ez's in our shop and I really observed the changes closely. I paid so much attention to this change simply to make sure that it was really necessary. I didn't want to invest all the time and money on high tension if I didn't have to. At the time we made the change I was the printer, supervisor, part time screen tech, etc. so I saw the changes the whole way through the process and as busy as we are, all the things that become easier and faster with higher tension add up to less hours per week to do the same production versus low tension screens. It's one of the main reasons why we have doubled our production capabilities since making the change. Granted, we are better at everything compared to 4 years ago and all that comes into play, but there is no doubt in my mind the role that the newmans and shurloc ez frames played. That is why I'm so passionate about it, but I'm also one of those guys who used static alums exclusively for several years and made some nice prints with them. We still have a small supply of statics here that we use for really easy jobs so I'm not totally against using them.
