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Thermal Printing Questions
Hey guys,
What are the costs with thermal printing?
If I am printing a 2 spot colour job and say the total area size is one square metre.
If I have 10% ink coverage on that one square metre will I still use up 2 square metres of ribbon?
Is that how it works?
Thanks
Jason -
9 Replies
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It depend on the machine. The pc-60 used to use the ribbon over the whole lenght no matter the coverage, this could be altered with a dip switch (but it was a engineers secret I think!) Then the pc-600 didn’t have this issue. Not sure about other thermal printers. To work out the cost you had to think that the ribbon is 10mm wide and however long and then do the maths!
I’ll pm the costs as I remember them.
G
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A gerber edge will only print colour where its required but just one dot across its 300mm print width will use the same as full coverage. Its very hard to calculate the cost over a large area unless you can see the design.
2 colours x 2 square M will cost around £14 for full coverage using normal spot carts or double that for the exotic metalics and chromes.
Colin
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do you get banding with the rolands?
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Jason I know there is a thermal printer that outputs wider than the edge,
but I cant rememer its name 🙁 (dc something)gerber thermal as a rough guide is about £3ish per colour per sqM + substrate,
Peter
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it be the summa dc4… had the webpage open last week
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dc3 & dc4s by summa do a good job and work on wider material in a similar way to rolands but do definately band at approx 100 mm intervals. The print overlaps slightly to avoid possibility of White stripes so lays down a double thickness of foil. Cost is said to be similar to edge although less opportunities to buy non oem foils means prices locked in by summa. Looked closely at these some time ago and for solid colours they take some beating but don’t have the res for full colour work.
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Cheers for the info guys.
I will keep looking into them.
The main work I want to put through these machines are small run jobs that require
Gold, Metallic and white.
Also 1-3 spot color jobs where the inkjet is grainy. These will be for small applications where the size of the job is no bigger then 5cm by 5cm and on inkjet the solid colours are really noticeable.
I couldn’t find pricing on the usage of consumables whereas we calculate our inkjet ink costs at $5 a square metre.
So with thermal I am looking at $5-6 a square metre per each foil I have loaded.
The summa looks like a good unit because it has inbuilt cutting which is appealing to us.
With the edge we’d have to purchase another plotter.
So I am still correct in saying that if I have two foils loaded I will waste the amount of both foils which equate to how much media passes through the printer still?
Like on ink jet I am only using ink where I fire the ink. My understanding of thermal is that even if your not using the ribbon in that particular pass your still wasting it.
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Jason,
When I had my gerber I ran it with signlab, you can use omega or, I believe flexi with a thermal module. I dont think in will run from Illy etc?
so you will need software as well. In signlab their is a foil saving feature, not sure about the other progs though,
The foils are not wasted as such. I’ll try to explain.
Geber foils are 300mm wide, If you had a stripe 50mm wide and 5m long
250mm of the foil would be wasted, but if you had a series of stickers say, and wanted to overlay a shape every 100mm the foil stops moving between the shapes, whilst the media moves on.
Peter -
Cheers Peter I understand it all now. What confused me as well I thought all the foils you wanted for a job were loaded at the same time. Its my understanding now that you load one foil at a time.
I will get my brother to run a feasibility report on the machine and see what he comes up with.
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