Latex honeymoon period now over

[George Zerbino]

Had mine for nearly 2 years, will definitively get another one after this.

Print quality is second to none, speed is very good, materials…yes it can be fussy but once you have all the types you need sorted (vinyl/paper/banner/wrap/popup/rollup/cling/flag/canvas/wallpaper/etc) then there is no real reason to change.

Cutting, well it is a print only machine so if cutting is no good then there’s something wrong with the cutter.

I use two Summas and every cut is bang on the money. I still have the habit of using a 2mm bleed from the Grenadier days, but in all fairness now half a mm is more than enough.

Just my opinion of course 😀
George

EDIT forgot to say that the very few times I needed support, it was very prompt and very good (from both William Smith and Artsystems)

[David Rowland]

the new L26500 is amazing .. the older one still fine tho and is available to buy as a used machine from some suppliers.

Cutting can be a bit tricky but 9/10 i dont have a problem

Some solid blacks don’t cure very well, can be a bit frustrating.. you just to keep an eye on temps a bit and airflow… takes a bit of learning

other then that, it is the best investment by far for us

Some good offers going around.

I am still on my first set of heads and just about to replace the cleaning cartridge, I had one big engineer change the heaters so far.
I am up to 1000 sq mtrs on vinyl and 3rd set of inks.. we had ours since September… Fab

[Peter Munday]

Thanks guys, interesting to hear your stories. I guess the only way to find out is to go for it.

Peter

[Peter Munday]

On another note, has anyone tried to wash any of their fabric prints to see if they are hardy enough?

Peter

[Jason Xuereb]

I’ve got two L25500’s and a L26500. Just got the newer model. Printing onto phototex on the L25500 ink adherence was a problem in the rain. It seems to wash away slightly. The new inks on the L26500 are meant to address this but we haven’t had time to test as of yet.

It’s a bit of a learning curve understanding the new factors that affect the materials but once you get over that its pretty smooth sailing.

[Neilly]

We’ve had ours about 6 months now and our guys don’t really like it. Print quality is great but we struggle to get the prints dry. Also the size of prints vary as much as 8mm on a 2500mm length which rules it out for many jobs.
I’m pretty sure this is down to the materials we have tried and we need to play about with the settings but that sounds like a pretty time consuming exercise.
Does anyone out there have a list of materials, and profiles, that work on this machine?

[Jason Xuereb]

The hp materials and profiles work really well.

[David Rowland]

is it not drying down one side? how warm is your unit?

our heaters got replaced, it improved but you need to play about with settings to get it right

The water issue is something that I head read about with banners, although I dont use it for banners only vinyl. I dont get problems with vinyl at all.

[Neilly]

Yes we tend to get patches that run the length of the print, particularly on dark colours, although there’s no consistency as to where these appear.
We mainly print on LG Vizuon vinyl because we like working with it and we tend to switch to one of the Rolands rather than persevere with the HP which really frustrates me 👿

[Jason Xuereb]

Increase the number of passes or increase your curing temperatures.

[Andre Woodcock]

We received our L26500 end of March. We are on our 5th set of ink now. And we are using 2 rips, Wasatch and Onyx Postershop. Print result on most media are great except for PVC banners that we need to lower temperature otherwise it burns the coating, print quality is not so good and we need to experiment more. Double sided banners was a problem at first. we wasted about 15m before we managed to get it right. We also printed some flags last month and up till now they look fine.

Cheers

Andre

[Fabrice Menard]

quote Dave Rowland:

Cutting can be a bit tricky but 9/10 i dont have a problem

hello,
could you please explain this? As the HP is a printer only I don’t get it. Is there any problem with your cutter?

[David Rowland]

my cutter is a graphtec..

The L25500 does warp the media with the heat, so it will not be 100% straight however there is a correction-factor on the printer now, not experimented with this yet as the results we are getting are very good anyway with the media we are using.

Cheers Andre for the info

[Neilly]

Can I ask what vinyl and profile you use for ‘print and cut’ Dave?

[David Rowland]

I am using Avery 2000 and loving it… profile on their websites

[Neilly]

Cheers Dave, we’ll give it a go 🙂