UV Flatbed printer recomendations please?

[Hugh Potter]

i’m not sure there is such a thing as low cost/ budget.

if i recall, the machines i saw at sign uk that could print direct to boards were UV printers, i may be wrong, but either way, i wouldn’t expect to see anything under 5 figures + vat, even 2nd user machines. 6 figures is probably likely too.

i guess your budget will dictate what is ‘budget’.

if you mean print to vinyl then have a look through the printing forum and check out what others are using, grenadiers, vp’s, etc.

maybe see what’s in the classifieds/.

Hugh

[Paul Geraghty]

sorry it will be a UV one we run a Mimaki Jv3 atm so I’d like the mimaki one but i’m not sure the boss will stretch to that

[Robert Lambie]

you will pay anything from £30k upwards for a uv flatbed. to get a decent entry one your looking at around the £60k upwards.

[David Rowland]

Paul, I spent a lot of time looking at the UV market, I suggest you keep your options between manufacturers open… first identify what you need to print and how often, that should give you a volume, if it is general sign shop work then there is some model geared up for that but cant do volume work.

[Pauly]

You need to be very careful also from an infrastructure point of view. Its one thing to have a flatbed, but do you have the, space to cut prints, equipment to cut prints, staff, correct suppliers etc etc.
These things have caught many an unsuspecting UV client unawares….

Also something to consider is the capacity of the machine and whether or not you could get something like an ezy-taper and a solvent machine and pay a dedicated staff member to print and mount prints for less than what a UV machine is worth in running costs and leasing.
If you have a solvent machine and it can run X amount of prints a day and a UV machine that can run X amount of prints per day. You need to keep in mind that once you reach capacity with a UV machine, its going to cost you a hell of a lot more money to exceed your capacity, even if its only by 10%. Where as a solvent machine could easily be put in at a more manageable cost to take up the excess instead of turning away clients or outsourcing and losing valuable margins.

I was heavily involved with the purchase of an Inca Spyder and implementing it a couple of years ago. And it was the unknowns that really cost us in the initial teething period. Although these days the thing runs split shifts 5 days a week and some weekends too!!

Be careful with cheap UV machines, they are a breed of their own and even a good solvent tech will possibly be well out of his depth without proper (machine specific) training.
Cheap machines have all kinds of issues in regards to flexibility of kinds of products you can put through them and cheaper components put in them to make a cheaper machine. It’s kind of like a guitar or most crafted musical instruments (or anything for that matter) You simply cannot build a good one for what a cheap one costs to produce.

Hope that helps, I don’t mean to turn you off, but be aware of your options before jumping into the UV market, because once your their, you may find the margins may not be like solvent once you take into account labour, operation, destroyed substrates from user and machine error and machine running costs.

Cheers,

Pauly

[Dennis Van Der Lingen]

when you consider a flatbed be sure to take into account that there are a ton of logistic problems to solve after getting the printer.

for instance:
after we’ve gotten ours the main supplier stopped coming in vans and started coming in trucks.

our printing media stopped weighing 30 kilos and started weighing 400/500 and more kilos coming in pallets of 2 meters wide by 3,5 meters long.

in order to cope with this we had to buy a forklift truck to unload the trucks.

when printing you cannot leave the printer alone (every panel needs to be inserted separately) so you need a dedicated employee to run the printer.

media has to be sawed so you need a machine for that to.

all in all buying the machine is the easy part.

as it is with every step into a new market, going wide for instance gives a similar problem: a roll of vinyl is delivered the next day -> a roll of 3,2 or 5meter banner is delivered next week and weighs between 80 and 160 kilos:

unloading the truck, loading the printer, changing media all become issues you never had before.

my advice is look beyond the printer to see if you can handle the new problems that come with your new market.

regards

Dennis

[Jason Xuereb]

This might be of use to you as a reference:

http://digital.signbusinessmag.com/sign … 812/?pg=76