Volume should be the biggest thing you look at. We fold a lot of shirts. We did over 100k pieces in the first 4 months or so of getting our K-950. It was harder to source bags for the damn thing consistently enough than it was to just wreck our queue with it.
No machine is perfect. We can hit around 900 pieces an hour on our machine without too much trouble. It doesn't like designs with lots of ink and certain bigger boxier shirts can cause problems. There are a few aspects of the bag inflation and sealing mechanism on the autobagger that could have been designed better in my opinion, but for the most part it works very well. Almost no down time and troubleshooting if youre at all handy is easy.
We looked at most of the options out there first, and chose the K-950 for a few reasons: output, reliability, footprint, expandability, and how quickly we could get it in the shop.
A good worker can manually fold/bag/tag around 150 to 200 pieces an hour in our experience with a flip fold. The pneumatic versions of those from what we saw can hit around 300 to 500 an hour on the folding, but dont offer a lot of additional speed when you factor in bagging. There is one version with an autobagger kind of built into the base, but it was significantly more expensive without a huge increase in output if I remember right. For us, the bagging was as important as the folding, so we only looked at inline automatic bagging options.
