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All feedback (3,646)
- b***b (462)- Feedback left by buyer.Past yearVerified purchaseExcellent service, item as described. Highly recommended.
- t***i (469)- Feedback left by buyer.Past yearVerified purchaseQuick delivery, as described, thank you
- i***s (370)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseI’d give 10 stars if I could! Royal Mail gave me a bag full of bits with an apology, and the proprietor of this company gave me a very quick and reassuring response that a replacement was on its way. It’s only a little thing I’ve bought but so useful as a GPS is out my price bracket but this gizmo is old school. Ten stars ⭐️
- 1***s (8)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseA+++ as described, arrived well packaged and quickly.
- y***a (386)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseThe seller bought the price down to make it possible for me to buy, but also wrapped the item very well for postage. I am a very happy customer and highly recommend this retailer.
- 3***m (234)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseTrustworthy seller, items received, well packaged.
Reviews (3)
May 18, 2024
Excellent purchase - thank you!
Excellent purchase - thank you!
Aug 28, 2017
Well Engineered Entry Level A4 UV Printer at an Affordable Price
As a producer of pouched dehydrated food, I've had great difficulty finding a good commercially acceptable methodology of labelling our products in-house. With over 30 products, each with different full-colour packaging designs, getting our pouches printed up and manufactured out-of-house was just too expensive - the best quote we had was 0.53GBP per bag for 30,000 bags across our all our designs, which for a small business like ours was just too expensive.
Therefore, for the past four years we have simply printed labels using a good quality household inkjet and affixed them onto our packaging. The good bit of this is that it is relatively cheap and simple; the bad bit is that the labels start to unpeel, they smudge if they get wet, and if the food we put into a pouch is 'knobbly' (think pasta) a label can't be affixed directly to the pouch and we have to use an additional outer wrapper. Unfortunately, this gives the perception that our products are of lesser quality than our better packaged (because they're better funded) competitors. This printer is changing that.
I am not saying that the journey has been easy – I am writing this review two months after I first turned the printer on – but the results we are getting now more than justify the cost and the time taken to get to where we are now. So, to the actual review….
Delivery – delivery, considering that the printer was shipped from Bremen, Germany, was surprisingly quick. It was shipped in a hard, thick cardboard box with plenty of internal padding to protect the contents. Note that the packed printer (and likewise the unpacked printer if you’re not a weightlifter) is a two man lift.
First Impressions – though this is a low cost and low specification entry level machine (c.1200GBP and sub-A4 capability), when comparing with UK industry standard entry level equipment (c10,000GBP minimum and A3 capability) it does not mean that the engineering behind it, nor the build quality, is in any way sub-standard – this is not a cheaply made piece of kit and I could not source the parts and build this myself any better for a lower cost. If anything, it is probably more robust than it needs to be, which is no bad thing.
Setup & First Use – Important: The printer does not ship with any inks; these must be bought separately (I got some flexible UV inks, suitable for my application, online via Alibaba at a much lower cost than buying in the UK).
If your only use was the printing of phone cases, or some other perfectly flat susbstrate, then it would be possible to set up the printer, and the accompanying software, using the guides given by the seller (a CD of various files is supplied) and get acceptable results on day one. However, our substrate is a flexible, multilayered pouch with a plastic zip incorporated, so it took both lateral thinking and a period of commissioning and experimentation to get the best out of it – you may need to do this too. We have settled on a rig whereby we have fitted the printer with a vacuum bed to flatten the pouch as it is printed, so as to get the minimum gap between the substrate and the printhead.
Observations over Time – The printer works absolutely fine once learned. However, even after two months I am still learning how to get the best out of it, especially in terms of colour matching. I still haven’t found a way to match its output exactly to what I see on screen. This though is more likely to be down to my use of CorelDraw and my lack of knowledge in respect of colour profiles than any deficiency in the printer or its accompanying RIP software.
All initial bugbears, such as the UV lamp not curing the right edge of the printed area until I read the manual files and got the software to print a right guideline to ensure that the printhead (and thus the UV lamp) passes far enough right to cure everything correctly, have been ironed out. A couple of things to watch out for – always ensure that the whole of the substrate passing under the printhead is perfectly flat and always ensure that the platen is raised such that the distance between the printhead and the substrate is only about 1mm – the printer has a guide to help you do this.
Final Points – This is a great piece of kit for the price which gives me a fighting chance of matching the quality of print on our packaging as our much bigger competitors. It is still early days yet – this is not the same as buying a plug in HP or Canon for the house – but the quality of what we are producing now gives me the confidence in our packaging to go forward with our marketing. We may only be a small business but we can hold our heads high and stand shoulder to shoulder with the ‘big boys’; we always knew our products were as good as theirs and now, with the help of this printer, so is our packaging.
Assuming that the printer is still giving good service in 10 months time I will be getting in contact with the seller to see if they can sell me an A3 version - thus doubling our output.
May 18, 2024
Excellent purchase - thank you!
Excellent purchase - thank you!