Buying equipment Indonesia

Richard: There is a lot of Digital Ink jet printing equipment available from Asian Manufacturers at prices that are significantly lower than from US or European Manufacturers. The low prices make the Asian equipment very appealing, especially when you consider that the equipment appears (at least on the surface) to stack-up pretty well spec to spec, and in some cases even with the print-heads and RIP software used in the print device are similar to the domestic equipment.

Whether the initial savings from buying an Asian Digital Ink jet Printer is going to outweigh the potential risks of buying equipment that doesn't have local service, support, and spare parts availability is something that you will need to consider. Many digital equipment manufacturers measure the reliability of their equipment on a scale based on, "Mean Time Between Failure" (MTBF) with a score of more than sixty days being a high score.

What this means, even on some of the higher-end equipment is that you should expect to have some kind of issue that needs to be addressed with your equipment every couple of months. In many cases these "fixes" will be small mechanical issues that can be addressed by the Owner/Operator or through a software fix, but some other issues will require manufacturer support.

If you are looking to go with the purchase of an Asian Manufactured printer, I would advise you to only consider those manufacturers that have made the investment to establish a US Service and Support capability. IMHO, the risk of buying a unit from a manufacturer that doesn't have some level of local support is just too great to outweigh the potential savings.

Please feel free to contact me directly if you have any additional questions or if I can be of any assistance.

Richard there is a small shop down the road from me that came across what he thought was a great deal. A dealer from Pakistan here in the US had a connection to Asian DTG machines, at a ridiculously low price and prints white. As Peter said on the surface they looked fine actually they are identical to SWF's machine but are literally nameless not a single name plate on the machine. The person not only bought one but bought two considering the stupidly low price. About two months ago I visited his shop and he had both machines collecting dust in a corner. He explained to me that one never worked from the start and the other never worked correctly, he hired an independent Epson tech that tried to cannibalize both machines to make one work and failed. The tech him self cost a small fortune. As for the machine manu itself there is no one, these were simply some crappy machines massed produced some where then sold to dealers and distributed around the world.

He now has two very expensive boat anchors.