# 6 Months with the Easy T Deluxe



## treefox2118 (Sep 23, 2010)

Looked at the date today and noticed that it's been almost 7 months since we purchased our Easy T Deluxe. I've posted a few times before regarding my successes and failures with the printer, and I figured I'd do a 6 month follow-up since I saw some negative posts and wanted to share my positive post.

*I am not affiliated with Easy T in any way, shape or form. I do not get commissions or any sort of gain for posting this or anything else.*

*General Review*
In 6 months, we've printed thousands of shirts. We've paid for the printer a few times over. We've covered our labor and utility costs. We've made a profit.

Have we had some issues? Absolutely. We've had issues with our Mimaki CJV60 printer. We've had issues with our Epilog laser engraver. We've had issues with our HP wide format printer. We've had issues with pretty much every high end printer we've purchased -- and the manuals and support for the Mimaki and the Epilog (both large companies) were much worse than what I received from Andy @ Easy T.

I'm aching to buy a second Easy T purely for performance needs (see below) but I'm also trying to save for a UV printer, so I'm battling myself over it. I considered a Neoflex but the price difference won't be made up in production at the moment.

*Easy T Pros*
1. It's really fast. A basic dark-on-light shirt job, with 2 platens and 2 heat presses, can knock out 36 shirts per hour. The ink reset system is what kills performance (see below). Without that issue, I know I can do 48 shirts an hour with small artwork (chest print logo, very common).
2. It's very cheap. I am always shocked when I do a job with 24 shirts and end up using $5 in ink (bags weighed, ink calculation in RIP).
3. Profit is insane if you have the work. 36 shirts (dark on light), medium sized graphic, 1 week turn around = $360 job. It's done in 2 hours, 1 guy. $100 an hour pure profit. $800 a day pure profit. $4000 week pure profit. If you have the work. It's enough to hire a full time salesman, which I plan to do in 2013, just for the DTG department. A second Easy T, hopefully with a fixed ink reset system, and the DTG room could be doing $2000+ a day in pure profit.
4. It just works. It took us 2 months to get to this point, and a lot of frustrations and headaches and ruined shirts and all the rest of that. But once we locked it in, we don't have any problems.
5. It's only going to get better -- maybe a RIP upgrade down the road, hopefully an ink reset fix down the road.

*Easy T Cons*
1. The ink reset problem sucks. Every so-often, the ink cartridges in the CISS think a cartridge or two is empty. It's a 3-4 minute reset procedure which kills productivity. We just do the reset once or twice an hour and push on. It's not a deal breaker, but it's unprofessional.
2. Maintenance is a pain. This is not an Easy T issue, it's an Epson issue. Cleaning the head wiper blade, the damping station, the print head requires a little finesse. There's no control panel to move things around like I have on my Mimaki solvent printer. Still, it's only 30 minutes a week so it's no big deal. 2 hours a month = $40 in labor to maintain. Pennies per shirt.
3. White ink sucks. I never got it locked in. I want to try it again but I don't feel like burning $250 in white ink again. It may not be an Easy T issue, it could be a ME issue. Maybe in spring. For now, we're CMYK only and we're making money. For light-on-dark, we print on the Mimaki using T-Printz heat transfer. It's cheap, fast, easy.
4. EKRip sucks, a bit. It won't save certain settings (their problem, not Easy T's). It has a few minor glitches that you learn to work around, but they suck. If I had a billion dollars, I would buy their business and fix the interface. But, for most jobs, we know all the work-arounds, and it works fine.

*My Tricks with the Easy T Printer*
1. Take the white ink and flush it down the toilet. Again, this could be a ME issue, not an Easy T issue, but I gave up. I'll try again some day.
2. Humidity to 60%. Always. Not just when you run the printer. Always. 3 humidifiers set to 60%, fill them up, run them 24/7. If we get under 45% or so, banding starts happening and it doesn't go away easily. We use a harsh solvent cleaning fluid to clean our printheads if we get banding because of low humidity. This will reduce the life of our printhead, but it's a quick fix and it works.
3. Temperature around 70 degrees, always. In winter in Chicago, our DTG room dropped to 63 degrees once. Banding. Took forever to warm everything up to 70 degrees. My fault. In summer, temperature went over 80 degrees a few times, had problems with ink curing and bleeding and other stupid issues. My fault.
4. Make sure the shirt is as close to the printhead as possible. 1/16" too low and you have banding issues, you have splatter/deflection issues/you have registration issues/you have alignment issues. This is a "learn until it's right" issue.
5. sRGB files, JPG, works beautifully. Colors are so stunningly accurate that I continue to be surprised when I print shirts on white. 
6. Shake your ink bags regularly. Twice a day, three times a day, I have no idea what's best, but do it. If I forget, banding crops up a few days later. Maybe some ink coagulated and ran down the tubes? No idea. But shake it regularly. CMYK, White, shake it all. Vigorously. Like you're trying to wake the dead.
7. Did I mention humidity? I did? Well I'll mention it again: 60% humidity, 24/7/365, and never let it go lower. Or too high.

*Easy T Technical Support*
I mailed Andy about 12 separate occasions over the 6+ months. The longest it took him to respond was 3 days, I emailed on a Friday, he responded on a Monday. Most responses were 12 hours or less. They're a small shop. I'm cool with that. $8000 wasn't expensive for this printer. My UV should cost $60,000 and I know support will be far, far worse. Once I broke a part myself, Andy overnighted it for Saturday delivery -- HIS COST. Once a part broke because of bad manufacturing (Epson), Andy overnighted it at HIS COST. I needed ink? He got it to me in 2 days. I had settings issues? He dialed in remotely and fixed them.

I haven't needed support in months. I beat the machine down until it started working right, and 80% of my problems were things I was doing wrong (humidity, temperature, shaking ink bags, platen was too low from head, bad RIP settings, bad color format file, etc, etc.).

*Next Step*
1. I want to get white working, for real. I mean it. I am throwing away jobs not doing it.

2. I want to make my own platens. I have a laser cutter, and am going to do it. Not sure what types of platens, but I'm ready for different locations and maybe even a platen that allows me to print over the hems and collars. We'll see.

3. Figure out if I can find a better RIP solution. It's an Epson, there has to be something out there.

4. Figure out if I can hack the ink reset system so I don't have to kill 6-8 minutes of productivity an hour. That will increase profitability 15%+ overnight.

Anyway, we love our Easy T. Our customers love our Easy T. I want a second one (dual CMYK would be awesome, for speed). I'll get it eventually, and I'll buy it from Andy, who has always met my needs based on my expectations.

It's an $8000 printer, not a $25,000 printer. I feel like I stole it, to be honest. That's how profitable the machine has been.


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## abmcdan (Sep 14, 2007)

Thanks for the feedback and review. 

I just emailed you a new version of EKprint with some of the changes requested. Let me know how that goes.

For printing on dark shirts here are a couple pointers:

The shirt matters so use Keya - Printable Apparel - Softer, More Comfortable, Stronger, Printability or Phoenix DTG Apparel if you want the best possible white. With either of these shirts we can get a solid bright white.

Make sure you are pretreating properly and using a medium to heavy pressure to press the shirt after it is sprayed.


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## treefox2118 (Sep 23, 2010)

yeah, that's hot. we're going to do a total ink system replacement probably next week, i might consider re-adding white ink and trying those shirts out.


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## selanac (Jan 8, 2007)

Great too hear some positive feedback.


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## flextees (Aug 7, 2012)

It is nice to hear positive feedback. I have been on the hook for 53 weeks now. I cannot get Andy to respond on a regular bases, he however responds here rather quickly? I have had one printer that we never got to work and have been waiting months for a XL to replace it. I hope that someday I will have money back or have a success story like this. Andy Please let me know what is going on, I am out a lot of money.


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