Ink Jet vs. Laser decals

[tom mann]

So my Epson C88+ not as good as the Epson 1800 , and that's why all my trailers came out like crap !

1K and 8 cartridges is out of my league . Oh well .

The Epson professional printers are by far the best.  The newer ones have 11 colors of ink!

[Kisatchie]

The Epson professional printers are by far the best.  The newer ones have 11 colors of ink!

Hmm... I bet it costs
over a $1000 to replace
them all...

[jimmo]

The Epson professional printers are by far the best.  The newer ones have 11 colors of ink!

Eleven colors? I can't even think of eleven colors. I would have to see some kind of comparison to make that upgrade from my HP8100.

What are we looking at for cartridge replacement?

[C855B]

Eleven colors? I can't even think of eleven colors. ...

Epson Stylus Pro 4900. Some of it is an extension of Hexachrome, a 6-color process system Pantone promoted around 20 years ago and discontinued in 2008. It added orange and green and then slightly altered cyan and magenta to result in a much larger gamut than standard CMYK. The rest of the "colors" Epson adds beyond CMYKOG are: light black, light light black, matte black, light magenta, and light cyan.

I can't fault this approach, even though I wouldn't want to foot the ink bill. I have an earlier large-format Epson pro printer with 6 colors (adds light cyan and light magenta), and I'm astounded how the improved gamut makes some of the prints "pop". I printed a shot of 844 last week I took a while back with my pretty old Rebel XT, and the printed result had so much depth it appeared to be 3D. Amazing what can be done this way.

Now if they'd only print white. 

[bbussey]

With the Epson being a professional printer, I'm sure there are some printing houses around that could be contracted to output digital artwork on your own paper.  Unless you're printing decals constantly, it has to be far less costly than buying one of the Epson printers outright and maintaining it.

[peteski]

Daniel,
if you can provide a properly scaled vector artwork in some format that Corel Draw 10 can understand (preferably in CDR format), I could print those out for you on Alps (I suspect that the panels would be silver with black/white gauges).  Max. resolution of ALps is 600 dpi (but the printouts look very sharp due to the thermal printing process). I'm not in a custom-decal business, but this looks like a simple job.  I still have several graffiti decals to be made which I promised to several TRW members (they are still on the to-do list). 

[peteski]

Note that laser doesn't have the resolution of a high quality ink jet.  For example:

Good example, but it is too bad that you didn't either photograph (or include in the image) a ruler to get a size reference.