hp designjet 800ps

[Martin Pearson]

Don’t know the machine but 24" is quite limiting in what you can do, What’s the maximum printing width of the machine?
Don’t know what the market is like for canvas prints but you could well be limiting yourself to about an 18" frame size for wrap round prints. Waste material costs can also be higher with narrower machines as you rarely manage to fit prints side by side to save material.
As for them being any good for signage well it depends what sort, internal stuff like POS & posters will be OK anything external is really a waste of time.
Banners you may find you can’t produce them cheaply enough, coated banner material is more expensive to buy than the uncoated media that is run through a solvent machine & you will only be able to produce narrowish banners to start with.

[Eddie Cotton]

thanks for the reply
they also do awider format i think somewhere around 44" cant remember, i was looking for a machine to print internal stuff like canvas, posters etc but would also like something for banner printing and signs at same time. id rather not buy one if it wont do much for me and id rather spend more on something usefull but at the same time i dont want to spend thousands on something that will get hidden at back of the unit.

[Martin Pearson]

Eddie, to be honest if my machine fell over tomorrow I wouldn’t go out & buy another one. I personally just feel that aqueous machines have to many limitations for a signmaker. I don’t use it for anything external, yes you can do temporary external signs but the problem latter when the customer comes back complaining that it has faded & has forgotten everything you told them about it not lasting. They may have no legal comeback what so ever so you are safe from that aspect but they WILL blame you & it won’t stop them bad mouthing you.
I buy in anything external & as long as the cost of the prints are covered then I am happy to do it that way. My machine doesn’t do a lot of work, OK I only work part time for health reasons so someone with more time might be able to do a lot more with their machine.
Before you actually part with any money I would sit down & work out what you will be able to do with the machine your looking at, how much more a wider machine would cost & the extra work it would bring in. For one thing I don’t think you would be able to do pop up banners on a 24" machine, most of the cases are wider than that plus the machine won’t actually print that wide so even if you did find a 24" banner cassette you would always have a border on anything printed. Canvas prints will also be limited as with a wrap round canvas you need about 50mm all round to wrap round the frame.

Other thing to think about is does the machine come with a rip or is this just the price for the machine?? Add the cost of a rip & the price will sore.