Jamie,
Kelly informed me that Rutand was closing out their current inventory of HSA and changing the formulation to support the WB-99 pigments as a true Pigment/Base system.
Did you hear differently?
I heard they were phasing out the 1st HSA (I think this is technically the second actually?) for an improved system. I didn't know they were actually going for the gold and making a base that can be loaded with WB-99 and has the opacity needed, that would be huge! My understanding is that no mfg has achieved that yet.
This was one of the primary reasons that we switched to Rutland for WB PCs- to use them across WB, DC, HSA -but sadly the tech just isn't there for it to work with HSA in most situations. Not to say it's not printable, you just need multiple screens for certain colors like a bright red for instance which is no-go in our market price wise and our presses aren't big enough to accommodate anyhow. It does print just fine for certain colors.
To clarify, there is a current base, the EW0000, that can be loaded with WB-99 and we do use it on occasion, it's just nowhere near the opacity of the "RFU" HSA mix system which uses a dry flake pig from what I understand.
On the Matsui side, did they reformulate their inks? I like their stuff but never got into it much due to the concerns I heard with their PC formulas, didn't seem like it was worth the hassle. I know a lot of their opaque whites, this is like 8 years back, performed a lot like the HSAs do today and wonder if they weren't HSA's essentially the entire time.
