Looking at replacing my trusty Graphtec FC-7000 as it is starting to have issues with the cutting head. Looking at a new FC8600 or CE 6000. Am also considering a Roland. I mostly due shirt transfers and vinyl sign cutting. Any suggestions?
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Looking at replacing my trusty Graphtec FC-7000 as it is starting to have issues with the cutting head. Looking at a new FC8600 or CE 6000. Am also considering a Roland. I mostly due shirt transfers and vinyl sign cutting. Any suggestions?
We started with a cheap Chinese plotter, upgraded to a Graphtec, an older Summa, and now have a newer Summa. The Summa is by far the best machine we've ever had. It has a tangential cutting head instead of a drag knife. Summa, as a company, is top notch and their support is the best I've ever used on ANY equipment in our shop. We bought our first Summa used. The guy said that he was selling it because it was too slow. We bought it, called Summa to order some replacement parts (cutting strip, belt, etc). The guy told us we didn't need the belt, to keep running it, then we told him the guy we bought it from sold it because it was so slow. He told us that it was slow because the guy was using the wrong cable. Sold us a new cable for $29 and the machine took off running fast. Sold that machine years later and bought another one, more sophisticated and it's been bulletproof. We cut vinyl, printed and laminated vinyl, and rubber masks for sandblasting.
If I had to buy another machine tomorrow, it would be another Summa tangential head plotter.
Just my experiences.
Thanks for that assessment Scott. I just got a new job as a sign fabricator and I'm looking to upgrade their equipment. I used the Gerber system before but I've been looking into the Summa since I read your post a few days ago.
I would like to do printing and cutting, do you have any experience with Summa's printers? I'm not looking at getting an all in one machine, but the two separate machines. Do you (or anyone else willing to offer an opinion) have any experience with the Gerber system that you could offer a comparison?
Hi Amada, I have limited knowledge about the Gerber equipment. I have been around some of it over the years, but I haven't been around anything really new. I'm not sure what you are printing, but when buying a printer, I think the Summa printer equipment is pretty specialized (gold foils, etc, available). We don't do any of that stuff, so I can't comment on that. However, we do print on a HP Latex machine, laminate, and then take it to the Summa plotter. It has the OPOS system on it and it'll read the marks and cut all around. It's a very solid system. Of course when printing and laminating, you get some slight size changes and distortions from drying the ink and even stretching slightly when laminating, and the OPOS system adjusts for that.
We use Onyx to drive all of that (the printer and the plotter), but there are plug ins for Illustrator from Summa that will put all the registration marks on it.
We really don't use it to it's potential but for the things we use it for, it has been rock solid.
If you're looking to print & contour cut, but might not have the volume to justify the $20k investment, there are a lot of wholesale printers out there that are pretty reasonable. When you figure having to stock all different vinyls, laminates, cost of maintenance, and ink you might just find it makes a heck a lot more sense just to send the job out. If you start doing a decent bit of volume, you can add a cutter to the mix and still outsource the printing and just do the cutting in house.
I can't comment much beyond that. I keep contemplating buying a cheap plotter. I have a job pending that might pay for it. I've just never been interested in doing cut vinyl.