Sky Air-Ship Skyjet FlatMaster+Roll, a UV flatbed printer with roll-to-roll at an affordable price.
If you attend sign trade shows on a regular basis you have noticed that additional features and options are becoming necessary to market UV flatbed printers. A four-color flatbed printer that only prints on rigid materials is now more difficult to sell than a printer that has optional upgrades. After the recession, manufacturers realize that sign shops are opting for versatility in their printers in terms of the range of products they can print, equipping the machines with
- More ink colors,
- white and varnish
- Roll-to-roll mechanisms
- RIP options
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Having additional features such as the roll-to-roll mechanism is a less expensive option compared to having one dedicated flatbed and one dedicated roll-to-roll. The prices from this additional mechanism vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, but for example, there are cases in which the roll option for a flatbed printer is around the US$80,000.
In these cases it would be better to have a dedicated roll-to-roll printer for roll media and a dedicated flatbed for rigid media, because the price of the roll mechanism is almost the price of a dedicated roll-to-roll printer, which is the best option to print on flexible media. In other words, an optional roll-to-roll system is only a good decision when its price is much lower than an actual roll-to-roll printer.
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Here is the advantage of Skyjet FlatMaster+Roll: the manufacturer has managed to make a good UV flatbed printer with roll-to-roll mechanism at a considerably lower price compared to most other (reliable) UV flatbed printers in the market.
The price in the United States is US$85,000, roll-to-roll mechanism included. As for the ink, the printer comes with CMYK, lc, lm, W, and varnish. The ink is manufactured by Toyo and the price per liter is US$75. This is one of the best ink prices for a mid-range printer we have seen recently. Normally the lower the price of the printer the higher the price of the ink. Some printers ask over $200 a liter for UV-cured ink!
The FlatMaster+Roll uses Konica Minolta 512 and you can have up to 12 heads: two per color, one for each light color, one for white and other for varnish.
As for the RIP, you can have Caldera, Onyx or Photoprint.
Next step is to undertake a site-visit case study. For any brand, for any class of printer, it is essential to visit, and learn from, a customer site who has used a printer for more than six months.
The model exhibited at ISA Sign Expo 2011 has already been sold to a sign shop in Michigan. The sequence of images below shows the Skyjet FlatMaster+Roll printing a sample of a Japanese painting printed on ceramic tiles.
The distributors of USA (Asher Adar, President JeTech) and Poland (Rafal Raczka, owner Planetgraf) were in the booth of Skyjet at ISA 2011.
If you want more information about this printer, contact
Mark Ma,
International Sales Director at Sky Air-Ship
skyjet@skyair-ship.com
First posted May 11, 2011.
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We are adding new pages and new features every month so it is not always realistic to update old pages from past years. All the old equipment is still available on eBay, so we keep even our old pages. If you wish only the more up to date product reviews, these are in PDFs (not in the web pages, but in PDFs which are linked in the columns at the right of every page). Please realize that we tend to update a page (or a PDF) primarily when it is clear that our readers ask about this brand or model frequently. With over 45 brands of UV printers and over 200 models in the past ten years, it is not realistic to update pages on obsolete brands or unpopular models. If you prefer to speak with Nicholas Hellmuth in person about a printer, you can bring him to your company anywhere in the world as consultant. By later in 2012 more of our web sites will be in 36 different languages with instant translation (and better than old fashioned web page translators of several years ago). So far all the languages are available on www.FLAAR.org and www.3d-scanners-3d-software-reviews.org. Next will be our www.large-format-printers.org. |
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