Hey Guys--
My name is Cody Ranaldo, I'm the Technical Director here at Griffin Editions. We do in fact use ChromaLuxe panels exclusively for our sublimation metal prints. dgberg is correct that there are a lot of factors involved in quality dye-sub prints (and quality prints in general) and to be honest, there's really very little OEM anything. Most of the time everyone's ink is made by a third party, paper is made by a third party, and especially in the case of large format printers, heads are almost always made by a third party. Epson heads are still by far the most common in sublimation/solvent printing, and we use both DX7 heads and the older DX5 ones (these are not even official Epson names, but they are what the industry goes by a lot of the time).
I just finished having lunch with Henry Wilhelm, and he actually pointed out this thread to me
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Basically, Sawgrass is the only company that really went after the hard-substrate sublimation market, so they are very well known in printing on ChromaLuxe and other hard substrates, but very recently we decided to stop using their inks after years of difficulty with nozzle dropouts in the dilute inks, whole channel dropouts in the black ink, and just various inconsistencies in general. We burned through two 9890s and a 9900 in 4 years, along with a number of head changes on each. I do all the maintenance on our printers myself, as well as all the color management and the quality control for all of our color processes here, so at least we were able to save a bit of money on service calls, since there is no warranty on an Epson once you convert it to 3rd party.... anything.
I'm not going to say which ink we switched to, but Wilhelm generously offered to test it for us as a favor in the hopes that the manufacturer would then pay to have the results published, so that is beginning as we speak. I have done my own testing as well (a couple test charts on the roof in the hot sun for 2 months) and I'm actually reading in the results of that test as we speak-- but so far the results are favorable against what we had been using before, and the black ink is much more "neutral" off the bat, so we've come quite a long way in terms of B&W dye-sub. It's an incredibly tricky and fickle process, and it's taken many years for us to work a lot of the kinks out.
As far as UV curable goes, as with any other inkjet based process, you're really only limited by the minimum droplet size of the heads in use on a specific printer. SwissQ uses a Konica-Minolta head which can produce at 15pl minimum dot-- quite a bit larger than the finest heads available today, hence their decision to include a light black ink where most manufacturers omit it. The Kyocera produced heads are the finest currently available (in industrial tech anyway) and can make a 3.5pl minimum dot, which puts them on par with most of Epson's offerings. It wasn't until Epson introduced the DX5 series that people really started taking it's prints seriously as photographic works-- also approx 3.5pl at minimum.
Literally no other manufacturer uses a light black (or grey) ink in their UV curable printers, and in my experience you can do a hell of a lot with proper profiling and a late-start black generation to minimize the graininess in highlights that can result from not having dilute greys, especially if you're dealing with a dye-based process like dye-sublimation.
IMHO what things really boil down to is that inkjet printers are simply a chassis built around a head, and when you go into the big leagues of industrial printing, everybody is picking from the same basket of head choices and simply deciding how solidly constructed the rest of the machine is, as well as the best way to drive said head. AFAIK Ricoh is the only manufacturer of UV printers that actually makes their own printheads. We are going to see an absolutely absurd amount of movement in the UV curable sector in the next 5-10 years now that LED curing is here, the prices will start to tumble, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see a UV curable, full paper-width head office inkjet printer pop up some time in the next few decades...
If anyone wants to get samples made or just generally talk more tech-talk you can contact me at
cody@griffineditions.comthanks guys!