I-Image Print Head cost

[inkman996]

We haven't seen the I Image in person yet but planning on it soon now that we seen the Douthitt. The biggest sticking point with the Douthitt is the cost of a replacement head. The numbers we got from the user were down right scary and he replaced them many times, he is getting maybe six months out of one head. Thats fine and dandy for a shop of his size but for us $5K is huge and completely destroys any realistic ROI. What the life span of their print head is based on our amount of screens is not something that anyone can estimate which makes it even scarier.

So before we even see the M&R unit can anyone give me some ideas of cost of replacing  a single head and how is the life span on them?

[3Deep]

That's a good question there Mike, this is unrelated but still close to your topic, a friend of our's use to use a OYO/Techsetter and the head kept going out at a cost of I think 1K or more and they finally bought an epson 4800 for film.  I willing to bet most of us don't think of a repair cost when we buy equipment or it might just be me, I sure Rich will jump with some answers for ya.

darryl

[DannyGruninger]

I'm not speaking on behalf of any company but based on research I've done here's my thoughts. They use a Ricoh gen 4 industrial print head. These print heads are available online from many sources for around 1k. The Ricoh print head can achieve billions of printing cycles before needing to be replaced so for someone doing less then 100 screens a day that print head should last 10+ years. I do know of a few companies that are using I image that make 250+ screens a day and have not replaced a print head. Their machines have been going for 2-3 years at this point. Knowing what I know about the print heads I feel confident that we shouldn't ever need to replace ours. A shop very close to me recently went with the wax unit your looking at and to this point they have had 3 print heads on that machine in the first year. To be fair I did hear the tech dropped one print head during install so really only 2 replacements but that seemed odd having to replace so much already. But replacement cost for the print heads isn't even close. The Ricoh print head is affordable enough to keep a spare but under normal conditions the print head should last forever or damn close from what I know.

[inkman996]

Now thats music to my ears!

Around $1K a head is far far from the $5k for the wax head. And the life span sounds excellent.

[GraphicDisorder]

Now thats music to my ears!

Around $1K a head is far far from the $5k for the wax head. And the life span sounds excellent.

I know you've heard it over and over.... but dude seriously just go for it.

[Dottonedan]

As a Tech, I read up on the heads just recently and yea, they literally tout some number near 3 billion "injection rate" or something. Going off memory on that so don't quote me.  Then, I will say that's as a tech for over 8 months and 35 installs, I have never replaced a head. Not one. To boot, I don't know of any other tech of ours that's has had to. I'm sure there had to be a few times at least.

I replaced another model (different co) once and the guy said he had it for over 10 years and replaced heads over 200 times and the machine only worked for half that time. I figured he was exaggerating but but even at half that. Sheesh!

[Gilligan]

I was thinking that meant injection counts not "prints" because there is no way to know what you are printing going in.

So how many injections on a typical full print?

[Alex M]

The ricoh head is rated at 100 billion firerings per nozzle.
Your standard Epson dx5 head is rated at 6 billion firerings per nozzle.

[Doug S]

Alex, does the epson 7900 fall into the dx5 category? 

[Alex M]

Dx7, but same rating for nozzel firering rate.