New Toy!

[Ramon Carrizosa]

Hi all. Just purchased a Roland Soljet Pro III XC-540. It's a large format printer, 52" x whatever you need. Great for posters, banners, decals for vehicles, windows, etcc... Photorealistic printing up to 1440x1440 dpi.
Also added a large format laminator.

[Rodne Gold]

Isnt this a bit close to advertising on the forum?

I also have one of those plus a 1600mm laminator ...great machine if you have nice niche markets ...not so great if you are competing in the general rats and mice digital printing/cut markets as a lot of the competition can sell at under your production costs.

[Ramon Carrizosa]

We do have specific clients (business to business) that we are dealing with and have some particular products that we plan to offer to the public.

[Darren Null]

what's the per metre printing cost? it's €40 (say $60) here

[Rodne Gold]

Retail digital printing goes from about $15 per sq meter at the cheap higher volume side to about $40 per sq meter at the speciality higher end of the scale. You can get a lot more for small run die cut stickers , up to about $80 per sq m (about 10 sq ft per m2) , overlaminated small die cut decals , up to about $120 per sq m and if you dome the small decals , prices rise radically to about $400-500 a sq m.
Production costs , excluding machinery , maintenance , operators , wasteage etc run to about $15 per sq meter for reasonable vinyl and using the Roland inks , can go as low as $7 a sq meter if you use cheap vinyl and aftermarket bulk ink systems.
We use ours almost exclusively for in house die cut and domed decals , trophy inserts and so on..we don't bother with the general market as it is hugely overcrowded with folk slashing price to pay off their machinery..
Every tom dick and harry in the signage business has a digital printer and it is fast becoming like the vinyl cutting market where garage operations proliferate.
If , like us , you have many other processes and machines , it can tie in VERY nicely with that.
Trade to Trade printing is a disaster as in general trade customers are extremely price fickle.
Running one of these requires a lot more knowledge and technical expertise than a laser - you have to be really good with design , have to understand and implement a stringent colour workflow , have to know material properties and develop profiles for various materails if none exist , and even if they do exist , they most likely not 100% correct , have to do machine maintenance and learn RIPs , you also need some serious space to both run the machine (It aint small) and need even more if you are actually gonna apply it to large sign substrates. Fumes can be a problem , albeit with "ecosol" inks these arent as serious as they used to be.
You also need some quite powerful puters and good monitors if you want to do it properly.
The Roland range , IMHO is one of the rolls royces of these type machines...

[Darren Null]

Thanks for a very detailed answer Rodne. I'm not looking to buy one (if I had any cash at all, a dye-sub and heat press would come first); but I'm sure your post will be invaluable to those who are considering it.

I've got some gigapixel panoramas that I'd like printed, but €40/metre puts it out of my price range. That's what they charge here, even with a ready-to-go TIFF file supplied. I THOUGHT they were bandits!

[James Jaragosky]

I found these posts very interesting but I must ask what they have to do with laser engraving?
Rodney thanks for the candid insight about pricing in this market. Not many people will pass along this type of information.
Jim J.

[Darren Null]

SSSSHHHHH! We're pretending to be on-topic.

[Scott Shepherd]

Not many people will pass along this type of information.
Jim J.

Digital printing is not like laser engraving when it comes to pricing. There are 1000's of places to check pricing, and some very good digital printing pricing guides that are published every year. They allow for all sorts of options, different substrates, services, etc.

Printing is a very competitive market, so their pricing information is pretty public.

[Rodne Gold]

Well let me tell you how it involves lasers.
Prior to use getting a print and cut machine , we did a lot of basic work using the laser to manufacture die cut self adhesive decals and domed decals.
Heres how it worked , we designed the sticker and the die line (cut line) in corel and stepped and repeated em , we put the cut line on a separate layer and used polyester self adhesive inkjet vinyl in a desktop inkjet printer - media you can get from www.papilio.com (http://www.papilio.com)
We then made a jig for the sheet (we always centred the print on the page) and loaded the printed page in the laser and sent just the cut layer to it. We ended up with sheets of extremely intricate shaped decals (the media is laser friendly) which we then applied to items like brass nametags and then domed. Heres some pics of results.
It was a VERY cheap way to have a print and cut machine , of course the roland is in another class!!
Our lasers have fine software tuning in either the X and y axes so any mismath tween printer and laser output is easily corrected. At any rate we used to get registration with the printed image of better than .1mm.
In the first pic the 3m , world of granite primi and motostars thingys were done that way , in the 2nd pic the flag and phadima and the flower and in the 3rd pic the motostars and africa were all done that way

[Darren Null]

Awesome work AND you got us back on topic! *doffs hat*

[Brian Robison]

How is the doming done?

[Scott Shepherd]

Brian, it's a liquid you put on with an applicator, and it's thick enough that when it hits the edge, surface tension keeps it from rolling off the edge. They have air dry and UV drying versions. You just squirt a small blob on it, it seeks the edges, then hit it with UV and it's dry.

That's very basic version of it. Search for "doming epoxy" and you'll find places that will send you free samples of both versions. Air drying can take 24-48 hours, so it's slow.

[Brian Robison]

So can you do it without the UV dryer?

[Rob Bosworth]

Rodne, don't those printers have a fair amount of problems with heads clogging if they aren't run often? The Queen and I considered adding used large format printers to our bag of tricks a couple of years ago. We went to a large Sign/ Printing show in Orlando. After a couple of hours of walking the show floor, I asked the Queen what she thought. She said she was very excited about the market of selling used large format printers. I then asked her to look at a number of the player's booths and tell me what she saw. After a few minutes she said all of the booths looked to have a lot of activity in them. I pointed out that most of the machines had at least two techs on each machine trying to keep them running. Then I pointed out to her that we did not have enough techs to really handle a huge increase in technical support for our new customers. Another hour goes by as we continue to talk to each manufacture, and she said it sounded like the most profitable side of that market was selling the consumables.

So Rodne, I agree with you. If you have a niche or find a niche, you can do very well.

We did not get into the used/ refurbished large format printer market.

[Scott Shepherd]

Yes Brian, you can, it just take forever, so you need a clean, flat, non-dusty location for them to dry.

Rob, the heads also need to be replaced from time to time, and not sure about the model Rodney has, but the people I know with HP's have to spend about $1,200 per head and it has a number of heads. Also, some of them have more than 8 colors, and each batch of color is about $400. Imagine having to spend $3,200 in ink to fill it up!

We looked at one about a year ago, it was small, 24", but it would do all we needed. The printer itself was about $3,500, and then to fill it with ink, in all the colors, it was over $2,000. The $3,500 printer ended up being about $7,000 to get it and actually have material and ink. You needed a $1,000 RIP program to drive the color as well.

[Rodne Gold]

Rob first : In the "old days of yore" in terms of digital printing , the inks were heavily solvent based to print on the less han optimal substrates , what with light solvent inks and really good media clogging is no longer an issue ..in fact the rolands even when switched off , but plugged in go thru a sort of print head cleaning every so often , this ensures even less problems. They use quality heads ..Epsons. These days only long term maintenance is is what you need (like a laser).
short term , the only thing you have to do is empty a drain bottle and wipe the head surrounds if ink builds up - print speeds are good ..tho at 1440 x 1440 you can do about 4-6 m2 an hr..but even for real fine detial work , 720 x 720 is more than sufficient.
A lot of other problems have been ironed out , like banding etc.
These are extremely versatile machines , we have printed on various papers , all manner of vinyl not just white , material , canvas , one way window film , mesh , flag material, stiff carboard (you can get up to 1mm thick into the machine) rowmark lights , flexibrass , banner , 1mm styrene , polycarb, iron on garmet stuff, holographic foils , reflective and glow in the dark stuff and so on.
I think your decision not to get into it was wise..

As to doming , I have a semi industrial line , we dome in a dehumidified room and use a 2 part urethane which cures to various degrees of flexibility (we have various shore hardnesses) to handleble state in 30 mins sans UV and packable states in 3-6 hrs - we have banks of shelves with lights to gently provide a heated environment and use builders plastic as dust curtains.
I use 2 automated dispensers - google cammda for systems from simple to complex.
I dont like uv systems cos you cant build high domes and its expensive and oddly enough , most arent uv resistant and yellow.
At any rate I have a few dispensers , they work off shop air and are somewhat programmeable as to shot size and with 3 of my ladies doming , we can do 10 000 items a day.
The 2 part urethanes are about $17 per litre and one cc covers a sq inch , so it covers 1000 sq inches , cost about 2c per sq inch vs up to 20x more for other systems.
The enemy of just about any doming system apart from SOME uvs is water - bone dry environment guarantees success.
You can now add glitters , pearls and other tints to domes for some subtle to glitzy effects and you can dome heat transfer garmet stuff you can print and cut on the Roland and heat press em to the garment after.
Occasionally when we want rock hard domes we use 2 part epoxys , but rock hard domes have issues of their own , like going milky , shattering , scratching , delaminating off the substrate , so domes with a bit of give are generally best.

[Rodne Gold]

Scott ,
Heads failing are rare , we havent replaced many and to ouir surprise our agent took a reading and said that the head hadnt fired a billion dots and had in fact failed at 700 million so he paid in the 30% we had left..they arent cheap , but nowhere near a laser source.
I think it costs more then $7k for a decent machine , the nice entry level roland sp 300i is about $12k ...comes with a rip tho and ink prices arent too bad either - printable media is cheap these days what with mainland china pumping it out by the containerload.. :)

[Scott Shepherd]

I think it costs more then $7k for a decent machine , the nice entry level roland sp 300i is about $12k ...comes with a rip tho and ink prices arent too bad either - printable media is cheap these days what with mainland china pumping it out by the containerload.. :)

It was a small machine we looked at. 24", and it was an Epson, which was getting good reviews at the time we looked at it.

If I had to do it now, it wouldn't be less than 54", but I hope to stay away from the ink side as long as I possibly can.

[Ramon Carrizosa]

very simple process, best is to search on youtube, several videos on process. Very cool look

[Mike Christen]

Well let me tell you how it involves lasers.
Prior to use getting a print and cut machine , we did a lot of basic work using the laser to manufacture die cut self adhesive decals and domed decals.
Heres how it worked , we designed the sticker and the die line (cut line) in corel and stepped and repeated em , we put the cut line on a separate layer and used polyester self adhesive inkjet vinyl in a desktop inkjet printer - media you can get from www.papilio.com (http://www.papilio.com)
We then made a jig for the sheet (we always centred the print on the page) and loaded the printed page in the laser and sent just the cut layer to it. We ended up with sheets of extremely intricate shaped decals (the media is laser friendly) which we then applied to items like brass nametags and then domed. Heres some pics of results.
It was a VERY cheap way to have a print and cut machine , of course the roland is in another class!!
Our lasers have fine software tuning in either the X and y axes so any mismath tween printer and laser output is easily corrected. At any rate we used to get registration with the printed image of better than .1mm.
In the first pic the 3m , world of granite primi and motostars thingys were done that way , in the 2nd pic the flag and phadima and the flower and in the 3rd pic the motostars and africa were all done that way

Hi Rodne

Do those items you show have clear doming, what product do you use for that and is it.

[Mike Christen]

Hi Rodne

Do those items you show have clear doming, what product do you use for that and is it.

Sorry Rodne, i must learn to read all posts and all words:eek: I think im losing it