Mlink in the building.

[3Deep]

Maybe being somewhat of a jerk here but M&R is always 9 out of 10 times going to produce better equipment than anyone, why because they wait and see all the the mistakes other equipment companies make and fix them when they introduce a simpler product (smart business)...ask Scott Fresner who I thought jumped out way way to early with his T-Jets.  Once the white ink issue is looked at more careful and fixed them all DTG machines will just about be on equal footing except price.

[CSPGarrett]

For the brother print if you have good nozzle checks look ahead at the pre-treat.  Not enough on the shirt to hold the white ink up or it is not dry/cool when printing. 

At least with your dupont inks you should be able to print all day and get the same results as long as your pretreat consistency is the same.

Just finished about 38 units and not a single variant other than a printer's eye looking for them.  But we are using a auto-pretreater.

[GraphicDisorder]

For the brother print if you have good nozzle checks look ahead at the pre-treat.  Not enough on the shirt to hold the white ink up or it is not dry/cool when printing. 

At least with your dupont inks you should be able to print all day and get the same results as long as your pretreat consistency is the same.

Just finished about 38 units and not a single variant other than a printer's eye looking for them.  But we are using a auto-pretreater.

We are on a auto pretreater as well using same amount of pretreat that the tech had us do.  (we used scale and all to dial in the amount).  We will start messing with it to see, nothing was changed it just started going down hill today. It was doing great prints prior. 

[CSPGarrett]

One of the dumbest things we did in a while was not prime our pre-treater enough.  So it mixed the pre-treat fluid with water/cleaner and it took the first 2-3 shirts to actually figure it out.  They still printed but not like normal. Once primed (Vipor) it went smooth.

[244]

Yea, little confused here as well.  If these are "best settings" for each machine, why are these looking worse than your untouched out of the box brother prints from last week?

These are the same settings as last week, that's why this is confusing to us as well.  Nothing has changes other than the machine sat all weekend.  Nozzle checks are good. Puzzling.  Everything we've printed prior to today has been pretty similar on each machine other than the Legends shirt. So this is interesting.

Welcome to DTG. Try to make a long run with DTG and you'll be pulling your hair!

That is not necessary true. We have people doing long runs daily for almost a year without issue.

[bulldog]

Brandt, what is that pretreat machine you have? I thought I saw it in one of the pics but it didn't jump out to me as to what it was.

[bulldog]

Yea, little confused here as well.  If these are "best settings" for each machine, why are these looking worse than your untouched out of the box brother prints from last week?

These are the same settings as last week, that's why this is confusing to us as well.  Nothing has changes other than the machine sat all weekend.  Nozzle checks are good. Puzzling.  Everything we've printed prior to today has been pretty similar on each machine other than the Legends shirt. So this is interesting.

Welcome to DTG. Try to make a long run with DTG and you'll be pulling your hair!

That is not necessary true. We have people doing long runs daily for almost a year without issue.

Rich, I can't remember if this was said already, is the Mlink running the new Gen5 head or is that not completed yet?

[244]

Yea, little confused here as well.  If these are "best settings" for each machine, why are these looking worse than your untouched out of the box brother prints from last week?

These are the same settings as last week, that's why this is confusing to us as well.  Nothing has changes other than the machine sat all weekend.  Nozzle checks are good. Puzzling.  Everything we've printed prior to today has been pretty similar on each machine other than the Legends shirt. So this is interesting.

Welcome to DTG. Try to make a long run with DTG and you'll be pulling your hair!

That is not necessary true. We have people doing long runs daily for almost a year without issue.

Rich, I can't remember if this was said already, is the Mlink running the new Gen5 head or is that not completed yet?

The M Link is running gen4 heads and the M link X is running gen 5 heads. Quality is the same. M Link X does a black shirt in a minute while the M Link can be up to 3 minutes.

[GraphicDisorder]

Brandt, what is that pretreat machine you have? I thought I saw it in one of the pics but it didn't jump out to me as to what it was.

Schulze

[GraphicDisorder]

So this AM we did just as we did yesterday on the Brother, but I did do 3-4 white head cleaning runs which seemed to improve the print a lot. But that was several steps more to get it to this point and white ink wasted testing. But here is today's print, this is a sell-able shirt. It doesn't look as good as the M&R IMO but its still a good print.

[mk162]

I will say after a weekend of sitting the brother does need a bit of help getting back to good shirts.

We shake the carts, do a white agitation(which is only good for the lines and heads) and then we print any CMYK jobs we have to help get things moving.  Then we will do at least 1 white head clean as well.

With the M&R cycles, does it use ink as it sits?  I always thought that made more sense than the Brother method of recovery rather than prevent.

[GraphicDisorder]

I will say after a weekend of sitting the brother does need a bit of help getting back to good shirts.

We shake the carts, do a white agitation(which is only good for the lines and heads) and then we print any CMYK jobs we have to help get things moving.  Then we will do at least 1 white head clean as well.

Did all that as well except the print any CMYK jobs as we had none. But that is our procedure and we repeated it today except I did a few more White Nozzle Cleaning steps just to be sure.  It helped it a lot as you can see.  It's a good print. Not as good as the M&R though.

With the M&R cycles, does it use ink as it sits?  I always thought that made more sense than the Brother method of recovery rather than prevent.

The M&R circulates the ink, so I don't think it uses it or at least not much.  The waste tank is probably less than 1/2 inch deep as of yesterday.  The Brother is a few inches deep now.  Ill wait maybe tomorrow and take a picture of each tank.  It's wasting more for sure. 

Just as a over all opinion as of today.  What I know at this point is Brother is using more ink (specifically white), the ink costs more money, and it wastes more ink.    We've seen the Brother print faster and slower depending on the print so id have to go with a "neutral" that as a advantage to either on speed. We've seen the Brother print as good or better in some respects (grey tones mostly) but we've also seen less detail in some of the color prints and M&R's white looks better. I would say the M&R has the edge slightly on print quality. We've seen the M&R have not a single printing issue and we hit our first already yesterday with the Brother. So advantage so far M&R. Those are just the facts at this point as we see them.

More to come.

[mk162]

Having a Brother I was rooting for them big time, but it seems M&R has made a damn fine machine, probably a better one.  The transition to digital printing equipment is a tough one for traditional manufacturers.  Look at Heidelberg.

[GraphicDisorder]

Having a Brother I was rooting for them big time, but it seems M&R has made a damn fine machine, probably a better one.  The transition to digital printing equipment is a tough one for traditional manufacturers.  Look at Heidelberg.

I was rooting for the Brother as well. Still am, make no mistake we are running both as rookies. I wanted to be in the machine for around what I spent on the Brother package. I could make that set up work but the ink costs are staggering at this point. Again when I am looking at a product I want to retail at $20 price point and the margin is key to making that work. A $3-$4 different per print is a huge thing, consider most shirts we do are double sided we could be looking at $5-8 per shirt difference.  Folks on a $20 item thats huge difference.  Some will just look at the cost difference of $25 to $40k. Already we see the Brother had a hiccup and required monkeying with... how much of my time will be spent doing that over the years if we were to use it?

The Brother just 2 weeks in has had a major issue with prints and maybe that's no big deal to fix as we figure out how to get that cleaned up... but it does cost time/effort/labor/ink/etc. Don't forget that on your magic ROI!

[Racer Tees]

There's a guy practically across the street from us that popped up with a Brother GT-341.  I went to have him do 2 youths to add to a customer order.  Paid $15 a piece for a 10x10 print and a 4x3 print on each.... and they were so terrible I wouldn't send them to my customer.  May have been my art, but who knows.  The pre-treat actually dyed the shirt as well.  Almost like it got burnt.

Really rooting for the Brother to do well here as I feel part of the problem I saw with this guy is they seem to have no clue.