Need some advice for a replacement printer

[prepressbb]

First off let me give some insight, i work for a full flexo print shop, we have bought two epson stylus pro 4900 printers to do all proofs for the process work mostly for our customers, recently we have found that particular model of epson printer really sucks, reason for saying that is we had the 4880 model before which worked well for the length of time we owned them, we replaced those last year with the 4900s and this is the second one that the printheads just went, we do a lot of printing no doubt, but its really frustrating that 2 out of 3 of our epsons are not functioning.

What i would like is some opinions on something comparable with the Epson 4900, keeping in mind that the print quality is a very big deal for us here.

Would really like suggestions based on practical experience.


looking forward to suggestions

Damian.

 

[seratne]

We have a Canon ipf 5100 that has been great for the most part. We have had to replace the head on it. But that was covered under warranty. And we purchased the extended warranty after the first failure. I believe the printheads for the canon are around $450 (there are two in the machine, and extremely easy to replace by just following prompts from the machine).

The print quality is near identical even under a loupe to our Epson 9890. The Epson complains many times a day that it needs to do a cleaning. While the Canon just chugs away. We are a commercial offset printer and have no problem matching our desired output profile, and we're able to match spots with no issue.

Before we replaced our aging Epson 9600 with the Epson 9890 we were looking at the Canon ipf 8400. If not for a great deal on the Epson we would have went that route. And even after looking at the savings, we regret not having went with the Canon.

 

[prepressbb]

any more recommendations?