What is the M&R Mlink Maintenance like?

[BRANDYWINE]

Hi All!
I currently own a Brother GT-381 and have been reading a lot of threads about the Mlink.  As a lot of you know the Brother has an extensive maintenance schedule and the ink costs are anything but good.  I did a lot of research before purchasing the Brother, just to find out that the maintenance was entailed and ink was expensive.  Also it doesn't help when your sales rep lies and doesn't tell you everything.......
If someone that has one can tell me exactly what the M&R machine requires that would be great!

[kingscreen]

Here's what you're looking for:
http://www.theshirtboard.com/index.php/topic,16601.0.html

[mk162]

Sorry to hear that.  I found our rep was very honest and up front, but it is still a lot of work and money to maintain.  back when we bought our the mlink wasn't out and the only other machine was the Kornit(there were others, but they were mostly Epson based).

If I had to do it again we would probably go M&R.  The Brother is a great machine, it's just still a little finicky.

[GraphicDisorder]

Like King posted, I would read my thread he posted there. I had both machines at the same time in the same building and as a new DTG user had a open mind to whatever worked best would be what I would move forward with and cost for me was a factor as I wasn't willing to throw big money at DTG without knowing what my market would be.

The Mlink maintenance is a utter fraction of the Brother. Just the Brothers weekly cleaning alone would be factors more time that you will spend on a M&R in a months. It's not even close. The machines are similar otherwise as far as print quality/speed. The machines are not even close in ink cost. I don't think I seen a single print off the Brother that wasn't at least 3x the cost in ink use/cost. We seen a few at 6x the cost.

If you start looking at the labor time on the Brother doing the maintenance and teh drastic difference in ink use/waste/cost vs the M&R it wont take long to make up the difference in costs. 

I would probably have gone with the Mlink X if I had it to do again. We just have the regular Mlink.