HP Fi-1000 Ink bulk Continious system

Alex_Trojan

Member
Hey!
Just wanted to share what it really costs to run a printer with the HP FI-1000 head.
I’ve had this machine for about 2.5 years and banged out ~1.7 million paper and cotton bags. When you’re printing on bags, ink burn is nuts—sometimes a single print is like 7–8 cents, sometimes 12-14, so 1,000 prints set you back around $80.
Heads lifetime is around 15–20 liters (I’ve swapped a few already).
Versus my new Epson with a new generation printhead single pass, the running costs on this thing were wild. I use now 2 machines - Epson and HP and it's shows me a lot of difference a cost of usage.
Then I got in touch with inkbags.com (they’ve got a YouTube video showing how to hook up ink bags), and boom—the ink cost dropped by a few multiples, which slashed my cost per print. After that, the company’s cash flow finally breathed—we were burning $5–6k a month just on ink.
Guys, do the math on operating costs before you buy a printer. It can make or break you.
 
I went with a firejet and it has over 10 million impressions in less than 2 years.
It has a standard cost calculator for ink and printhead consumption and we print everything from 12x18 sheets to tiny little envelopes, bags etc.
The first printhead lasted for 7 million imp. but 1 printhead is 6000 dollars......
Ink started at 620 bucks for a 2 liter box x 4 colors and now its around 800 with Tariffs and being greedy......
The color is not that good though due to the ink basically penetrating into the paper so digitally treated stocks make a huge difference if you need great color but that cost more obviously.
I'm torn on if I want to buy another, or buy 2 of the HP-1000 platforms for roughly the same cost as 1 firejet.
 
Since you have the firejet and are familiar with the Duraflex heads, have you looked at the Elan 170?

They also have a coater so the ink will sit on top of the paper before it goes through the printer.

Interesting...Looks almost identical in terms of specs. I would be very interested in a pre-coater for sure. The Firejet has also come out with a 225 FPM speed but.... you need to lower the resolution down a little. IDK, give me a good old fashioned 4 color offset print for the color win.
 
The link for more information about the pre-coater, does not work. Do you have any details on it? Does it allow inkjet to print onto standard offset coated stocks?
 
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The link for more information about the pre-coater, does not work. Do you have any details on it? Does it allow inkjet to print onto standard offset coated stocks?
I am researching this. It looks like they take a Tec Lighting coater and change out the rollers with some special coating rollers and hook it up to Delphax inkjet printer which is a Memjet DuraFlex printhead module. Thats pretty cool you can coat inline then get the color that pops off the sheet. I have some inkjet treated paper which you could buy from Pixelle which also works incredibly well if you want color to pop from 24# offset paper. You can also use it offline......
 
The pricing was cheaper when I compared using the coater vs buying inkjet envelopes. But I only looked at this for envelopes. The color does pop more with the coating in the samples I saw in person.
 
I went with a firejet and it has over 10 million impressions in less than 2 years.
It has a standard cost calculator for ink and printhead consumption and we print everything from 12x18 sheets to tiny little envelopes, bags etc.
The first printhead lasted for 7 million imp. but 1 printhead is 6000 dollars......
Ink started at 620 bucks for a 2 liter box x 4 colors and now its around 800 with Tariffs and being greedy......
The color is not that good though due to the ink basically penetrating into the paper so digitally treated stocks make a huge difference if you need great color but that cost more obviously.
I'm torn on if I want to buy another, or buy 2 of the HP-1000 platforms for roughly the same cost as 1 firejet.
write me on WA +48799802890 i can offer you nice machine for single pass printing, so much better that duraflex and fi-1000.
i use that in my busisness
 
   
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