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Does anyone use Colorific inks.
Had a price to change to the Colorific bulk ink system from Selectech. Does anyone use this yet.
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8 Replies
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Hi Martin,
I use colorific inks in a bulk ink system, have done since i bought the machine from new. -
ive been using this for years martin…
i think i was the first "sign maker" in the uk running this inkI run the colorific bio-ink on my grenadier and it has never missed a beat since. [bulk ink system]
could just be coincidence, or i am lucky! but we had a technician in for light maintenance and one or two heavy fixes over the years. switched to the bio-ink and i am lucky if i have had 3 or 4 visits in 3-4 years. even then it was very light maintenance and we are talking an 8 year old machine.we then switched from roland to colorifics Pro-AJ ink for our Roland AJ printer.
1 litre carts. same thing, in fact, we have had the machine about 2 years now i think and have never had a single technician call out for anything.two machines, two different types of colorific, 3-4 years of use, zero problems.
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quote Robert Lambie:we then switched from roland to colorifics Pro-AJ ink for our Roland AJ printer.
1 litre carts. same thing, in fact, we have had the machine about 2 years now i think and have never had a single technician call out for anything.two machines, two different types of colorific, 3-4 years of use, zero problems.
Was this a straight forward plug and play Rob? Our AJ is out of warranty at the and of this month and I am seriously considering the jump to Colourfic inks. Can we continue with the Eco Extreme inks for the other colours or do we need to change all colours together? Do you use the same profiles as original inks?
Also, are there any drawbacks? (odour, drying time etc)
Apologies if some of the questions have an obvious answer but we have always stuck to the Roland originals on the Versacamms and never considered changing until now.
Cheers
Gary
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We tried it a couple of years ago when our JV3 was out of warranty. Overnight, we
went from having a machine that ran day in, day out with no problems whatsoever, to
one which had regularly blocked nozzles, and ink drop outs. Also, despite what anyone
else may say, it smells much worse than the OEM ink. It may be the case that you get
used to it, but all of our staff complained of the smell, and some suffered headaches
(including me). We switched back, and have had no further problems, so for us, it
wasn’t worth it, as we spent more time recovering the machine than we saved in ink
costs. This is just my opinion of course, and it may be that they have changed the chemistry since then to reduce the odour. -
Our JV3 when we had it was switched over… i must admit we started to get problems… but I couldn’t identify if the problems were caused by wear and tear or the ink. The machine is no longer here
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quote Gary Birch:quote Robert Lambie:we then switched from roland to colorifics Pro-AJ ink for our Roland AJ printer.
1 litre carts. same thing, in fact, we have had the machine about 2 years now i think and have never had a single technician call out for anything.two machines, two different types of colorific, 3-4 years of use, zero problems.
Was this a straight forward plug and play Rob? Our AJ is out of warranty at the and of this month and I am seriously considering the jump to Colourfic inks. Can we continue with the Eco Extreme inks for the other colours or do we need to change all colours together? Do you use the same profiles as original inks?
Also, are there any drawbacks? (odour, drying time etc)
Apologies if some of the questions have an obvious answer but we have always stuck to the Roland originals on the Versacamms and never considered changing until now.
Cheers
Gary
Gary
When we did the change for our Grenadier (Roland Soljet) it was puposely done to make me the guinea pig. So on that I had to switch to their inks "by the book" just incase a problem occurred and it was my machine, as oppssed to the inks change.
so to avoid any doubt, an independent technician (Ken McKnight) came in, did a system check, print tests and for my own refernce itook a vibrant coloured picture and printed it full width of the machine, 54 inches.next the new ink system was put in with the inks.
this was a simple clear 440 cart that you topped up on the fly as and when needed with our litre bottles.once the ink tests were run, we run printed tests and more. then printed the same picture i had asked to be printed prior.
All tests were done using the exact same profile. "no tweaks were made to the software"
side by side everything was exactly the same if not better.
the large vibrant picture i had been printing prior now looked "ever so slightly" more vibrant in some of the brighter colours.we changed nothing but the inks to Colorific Bio-Ink.
as i have said above, i have had a huge decrease in technician call outs
over the past 3-4 years. the machine is now 8 years old and still pumps out prints and earns us good money.based on the AJ-Pro Inks Gary… ill be honest mate, i think we just did the plug and play scenario this time. i forget but i am pretty positive we did.
we run the exact same profiles as before, nothing has changed what so ever. and to date, we havent had a single technician in to see the AJ since purchase. (touch wood) 😀Jamie, "the Bio-ink" we run in the grenadier does smell different mate.
I think it smells like strong marzipan… 😀
However, i dont even notice the smell, nor anyone else. the only time i ever catch a whiff of it is when its doing long heavy saturated prints. but then again, i got that the first 6 months of ever getting our printer. i think its just adjusting to the new smell mate.
as for any issues, i obviously cannot comment on your own expereince.as i said, i was made guinea pig.
i was genuinely asked to give them feedback on my experience’s, "good or bad" I am sure they were quietly confident in their product or i would have been asked, but still shows how much beleive they have in their product to allow someone with a platform like UKSB to be as vocal as i like about it. -
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we changed nothing but the inks to Colorific Bio-Ink.
[/quote]It may be that the Bio-Ink is a different formulation to the one we tried, which was the
standard solvent one, so this would explain why the smell wasn’t so bad. The solvent
one certainly stank mightily, to the point where we couldn’t stand it. -
PRO-JV3 ink
When we changed, our ventilation on our JV3 was primitive and the first long job did stink our workshops, I had to put in extra ventilation to remove the horrid smell. One of our members of staff got ill and had to take a day off.
We got used to the smell but a few of us did ask if we could go back to the original ink, I understood that as printing internally for offices caused a few problems as the prints would stink!
With regards colour matching, yeah it changed even tho it was mix-and-match formulas, this was almost correct, it was very good in matching up with previous jobs but I knew it had changed. I did some tests before hand where I printed out pure CMYKltmltc strips in the engineers menu, so I had reference (ok these could change by head height or alignment) but I did print out after conversion and I noticed that the magenta was Darker and I think the yellow was thicker.
We have a pantone chart mounted on board and this also had to be reprinted, so the colours matched. It wasn’t far off but if I had a RIP at the time with a spectro then it would have been worth doing.
Now I have two printers, the Anapurna and the Latex which has build in Spectro, the Latex is indeed very accurate with colours and I would say it is a good guide to see where things are going wrong. Comparing prints between the Latex/anapurna and the ProJV3 ink makes the machine look well out.
If you are seeing a difference between prints before and after, then "things have changed". You have to take that as your new standard of colour but if it hasn’t changed much then you should be good.
Cost saving, well imo if you are printing banners day in day out then it is worth it but if your printing occasional then not worth it at all!
Just my opinion
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