Epson's first foray into wide-format printing was with a series of aqueous ink printers that established a good reputation for photographic and proofing applications. But Epson was slow to get into display graphics, preferring instead to sell its printheads and inks to other vendors on an OEM basis. However, in recent years Epson has made a determined play for the display print market, with both solvent and dye-sub printers as well as a newly-launched brace of aqueous CAD/ graphics machines.
Currently, its best selling solvent model is the SureColor SC-30600. It’s 162.6cm wide and prints to a variety of media including vinyl, banner, canvas and clear film. It’s a four colour machine, using the UltraChrome GS2 inks, an eco-solvent ink that Epson says is odourless and nickel free and can be used without any special ventilation. Epson claims the inks are lightfast for up to three years outdoors without lamination.
Dominic Fowler, Epson’s technical specialist for pro graphics, says that one of the main selling points of the printer is its image quality, which is largely due to the printhead. This is designed by Epson and is not available to other OEM manufacturers. Epson has rebranded it as a PrecisionCore printhead, though it is based on the thin film piezo, or TFP, architecture that Epson has used since 2007. Fowler says that Epson has managed to scale down the Piezo element by up to 400 times so as fit more nozzles.
It has a native resolution of 360dpi and Epson claims printing resolution of 720 x 1440dpi, depending on the number of passes. It’s a greyscale head with a minimum droplet size of 4.2pl and is designed to last the lifetime of the printer, though replacements are included in the warranty.
Epson has also developed a fairly clever loading system. First, you place the roll on a holder at the back of the machine and then push a handle to lift this up so that one end of the roll can be pushed into the take up holder, and the other end can then be closed around this. You can almost do it one-handed and the machine will take up to 40Kg, though there is an option the double this to 80Kg.
The SureColor has an automatic tensioning control system, or ATC, complete with powered feeds front and rear. The rear feeder has a motor which can check and test for tension so you set a value on the Rip or control panel and it maintains the tension. It continuously checks and adjusts this to use less energy as the roll diminishes during the print run. It's not necessary to feed the media through to the front take up as the powered rear feeder ensures that the media is always under tension, which means you can start printing at the top of the roll without losing any media to the take-up system.
As with most roll-fed printers, the media is loaded from the back so you'll have to allow a reasonable amount of space around the machine.
There's a control panel to the right side, which can be used to set the machine up, including setting the media profiles and the platen gap. These things can also be done from the Rip, though Fowler usually sets it up on the control panel, and sets the Rip to take its settings from the printer.
It will work with most available Rips. Epson shares the SDK with any vendor that applies giving details of the printers native settings so that each Rip can be optimised to give the best results. In practice, since Epson sells through a network of dealers, the dealers create bundles with the Rips they feel most comfortable with. For our test we used Onyx ProductionHouse.
The machine takes about ten minutes to start up in the morning. It can be set up for automatic cleaning, which it will usually do every 40 hours. There's a capping station on the right hand side, and a cleaning area on the left side where you can reach into the machine to wipe the nozzle plates. Epson recommends cleaning the capping station once a week to make sure there's no dirt or hair.
ON TEST:
For these tests we use two A0-sized test charts - one being mainly solid Pantones and the other being mainly photographs. We print the files at the maximum quality, which would normally be 12-pass but we ended up using eight-pass as this was the highest quality mode that Epson had a profile for the Metamark MD5 polymeric media that we used. The fastest print speed is 29m2 /hr, which is a draft mode but eight-pass should be around 7.3m/2 hr. In practice it took 47 seconds to Rip each chart and 9.20 minutes to print.
We also used the six-pass mode to gauge the likely productivity that you can expect with this printer, which took 42 seconds to Rip and 7.04 minutes to print.
We didn’t seem to waste time waiting for the printer, which takes about three minutes to warm up to temperature. Fowler says: “Sometimes you can bypass that and let it warm up as you print but it depends on the media.” Generally cheaper media are more delicate to get the right temperature.
The printer reported ink consumption of 13.63ml for our Pantone chart and 9.33ml for our photograph chart in six-pass mode. Strangely, eight-pass mode used only 8.87ml of ink for the photograph chart, although the eight-pass Pantone chart used 14.14ml. The print quality was excellent in both modes, producing good deep colours that seem to lift off the print. The resolution was quite sharp, with the text in our panel on the eight-pass test being quite readable at four-point, and even the three-point text being quite legible, and although the text on the six-pass print was slightly less even it was still legible down to three-point.
However, the lack of a white ink was noticeable on the white on black text panel, where the text was much thinner, so that although legible at four-point it was really only comfortably readable at six-point. There was some vertical banding on the large reflex blue panel, which disappears from about two foot away in both eight and six-pass prints
CONCLUSION:
Although the printers are sold through dealers, Epson itself takes care of the support, having four dedicated technicians, and claims a 98% next day fix rate.
Epson's recommended price is £11,995, though since it only sells through its dealer channel you may be able to find it cheaper. The cost includes the printer, a two-year warranty that includes the printhead, and a training session at Epson's demo centre. The CMYK inks cost £127 each for a 700ml cartridge.
There is an optional dry bar that can be fitted above the heater. It’s basically a series of fans that pass air back over the media to help speed up the out gassing process, and therefore enable faster printing, without zapping it with extra heat.
Another factor to consider is energy cost, with Epson claiming that the low energy usage of its printers is more environmentally-friendly than HP’s water-based latex ink machines. Fowler says that in normal operation the SC-30600 uses around 600 watts, which can rise to 850 watts if the machine is working flat out, dropping to less than 1watt in standby.
Overall, we were very impressed with the SC-30600, which delivered extremely good quality images relatively quickly, for a fairly low outlay.
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