Printer Review: MacDermid ColorSpan DisplayMaker 72s "Gator"
By Karen Lowery Hall
The
MacDermid ColorSpan DisplayMaker 72s, also known as the "Gator",
is a 72" wide solvent ink printer. It is a four-color (CMYK) printer
that offers 600x600-dpi resolution.
James Stallings recently installed a Gator in his business, Nacogdoches, TX-based Xtreme Paint and Graphics. The aspect that makes this review particularly interesting is that this is the first inkjet printer Stallings has ever used. "It’s been a learning curve," he admits.
After a single day of training, he hit the ground running. "I was impressed—I really thought it was going to eat me alive, but it has not been bad at all," Stallings relates. "I’ve got plotters, but I’ve never worked with anything that handles TIFF images at all. I’ve only dealt with vector images, so I’ve never had to deal with color before—setting up ICC profiles and such. It’s just a different world—like using the plotters would be a different world for somebody who’s printed all their life."
Xtreme Paint and Graphics is producing, among other things, spinnakers for sailboats and awnings for race car teams. Eventually, he plans to add vehicle wraps to his company’s job mix, but that will happen after he masters the current challenges.
DisplayMaker
72s
|
The awnings Stallings prints are designed to attach to the side of a semi-trailer so that the crew can work on the cars under them. He describes them as being more like a tent. "Most of [the printing] is just graphics we do in Corel," he says. "We’re capable of doing a photo or something like that. On a spinnaker, where you’re far enough away from it, that would be fine. On the race car awnings, where you’re a lot closer to it, the pixilazation becomes a major issue."
There was a problem with the first job he ran on the Gator, but Stallings points out that it wasn’t the fault of the printer. "The first awning we did, they came back and changed the rules and went to a flame-retardant material, but we got that ironed out. It was about 16x70’, so it was a huge piece. The average one will be about 700 square feet, so there’s a lot of surface area."
The only real problem he has experienced so far has been a recurring software glitch. "The software is lacking, but they’re working on that," he says. "We have vector image files that we have to convert over to TIFFs. When I convert them, it crashes my computer if they are any size at all. So I have to make it real small, then convert it, and when I do it pixilates real bad. The RIP software is fairly simple. It’s not wanting to handle these monster files that I’m dealing with, but I don’t think just everybody has to deal with five, six, or seven gigabyte files. My hat’s off to them—their support is wonderful," he says, referring to the ColorSpan support team.
"I checked with the billboard industry, thinking that they [worked with very large files], but they are printing at 36 dpi and below, and I’m still trying to print at 150 or 200 dpi. And I’m actually doing more area than they are. So we’re kind of in uncharted water and having to figure it out," he explains.
The only thing Stallings says he would change about the Gator is the way it handles material. "Part of the problem is that you’ve got to have take-up tension for it to work right, so you have to lock your material onto the bars," he points out. "If you get a real soft-hand material and run it across the heaters at a slow rate of speed with a lot of tension on it, it will stretch. But all you do is have the machine run a media feed calibration: It prints what it thinks is 10", then you extremely accurately measure that, and tell it what it really is, then it’s done.
"I haven’t run the other machines, but this is pretty automated as far as keeping me out of trouble goes," he laughs. "It’s really simple."
The feature Stallings appreciates most about the printer is that it is completely stand-alone. "It checks itself, rechecks itself, and calibrates itself. If you haven’t seen it running diagnostics, you’ve missed something," he states. "It’s the only one out there that has its own onboard spectrophotometers. It automatically picks up the material width and the location of the material on the platen. When it runs its own diagnostics, it reads which chips are performing right and which ones aren’t, because it picks that up with the spectrophotometer. It’s pretty impressive, actually."
Stallings looked at other printers before deciding on the ColorSpan unit. "There was a lot that was manual on the other machines that, on this one, you just push a button and drink a glass of tea while it’s doing the work," he says. "You pay for that, but it’s priceless when it comes to keeping the thing calibrated and running right. I’m glad they talked me out of the lower range machines that I was looking at."
When asked about jams or other common printer complaints, he answers: "I went to watch a demo in Dallas and that guy had some trouble with jams. I’ve probably run 3,000 or 4,000 square feet of material through it and I haven’t had the first hint of anything like that."
Another aspect he points out about the machine is its rate of ink consumption. "If there’s any one thing that needs to be brought forth, it’s the use of ink. I keep thinking it’s just not right—it’s just not using any ink. The first awning I did was well over 1,000 square feet and it used less than a liter of ink," he relates. "The whole thing was colored gray, plus all the graphics, and I had the resolution set at 120, and it used less than a liter of ink. I had it in medium mode—not high resolution mode. They told me it would do that when I saw it at the San Diego show. I didn’t believe them, but it honestly will. They told me that in the period of a year of two that would make up the difference between the cost of it and the other machines. I believe them now. They represent it for what it is, I’ll put it that way."
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