EFI Vutek GS2000, A High Quality UV Inkjet Printer For Up To 2-Meter Substrates
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The GS family was officially launched at FESPA '09, although only the VUTEk GS3200 combo printer and the VUTEk GS5000r 5-meter roll-to-roll printer were exhibited in that fair. The print quality of the GS5000r was not the expected, by ISA 2010 it had improved significantly.
The EFI VUTEk GS2000, a newer combo printer seems to be an upgraded version of the VUTEk QS2000 launched years ago, just before SGIA '06, but with significant improvements to have the GS2000 in your list. The philosophy seems to be achieving higher print speeds without sacrificing quality. This is what every sign shop or print business would like in a machine, however, realize this type of machine is in the high-end price range, and would be advisable only for those businesses that already produce big quantities of print jobs.
The following chart summarizes the improvements of the GS2000 compared with the older QS2000
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EFI VUTEk QS2000 |
EFI VUTEk GS2000 |
Print speed |
750 square feet/hour (70 m 2 /h) |
2000* square feet/hour (186 m 2 /h) |
Inks |
CMYK (lc, lm, W optional) |
CMYK, lc, lm, ly, lk +2W |
Ink containers |
3.25-liter containers |
5-liter containers |
Printheads |
Seiko with drop size of 30pl |
Seiko 508 with drop sizes of 24pl or 12pl |
*This figure is achieved with the 5-color print mode (read further on)
One of the advantages of the EFI printers is that the 1-year warranty does cover the printheads as well, unlike other companies that cover the printheads only for 6 months.
What I like about the ink configuration of this VUTEk printer is that the options to print white have been designed to produce several options. You can do:
- Overprint
- Underprint
- Spot
- Underspot
- Fill
- Overspot
About the colors and production options, another upgrade is that you can switch from the high-quality print mode that uses 8 colors, to a production print mode that uses 5 colors (CMYK + W). This change would take only minutes.
In general, the more colors a printer has, the better tends to be the quality. Some of the Inca printers offer Orange and Green besides the traditional colors. However, one of the sales managers at Océ commented that the variable drop size of their print system eliminates the need of light colors, making the whole printer more price-efficient. We would need to evaluate the quality of a print sample produced with an 8 color printer versus the quality of a print sample produced with a variable-droplet-capability printer.
The applications listed for the printer are:
- Banners & signage
- Billboards
- Building wraps
- Display graphics
- Fleet and Vehicle graphics
- Floor graphics
- Glass
- POP/POS
- Outdoor graphics
- Stage Graphics
- Wall Murals
- Window Graphics
As for materials this printer handles most traditional inkjet substrates such as
- dibond
- styrene
- coroplast
- PETG
- vinyl
- sintra
- ABS
- corrugated
- polyethylene
- lexan
- vinyl
- and others
The EFI VUTEk printers are among the most recognized brands in the industry. Up to now this company has been focusing on POP/POS and advertising applications in general, but I would like to see a wider range of applications being marketed for this printer, especially because we know of the capabilities of theses machines. Foamboard, Styrene, dibond, are great substrates to print on, but what about wood, glass, concrete? We visited a sign shop in Korea that is using its VUTEk machine to print indoor and outdoor applications on glass.
First issued May 21, 2010.
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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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