One Year With A Kornit 921
One year with a Kornit 921 and we wanted to update the t-shirt community on our experience. We wanted to give back a little to the community where we looked for help when considering the purchase of a Direct To Garment printer. There are no easy ways to find the "best" manufacturer or digital printer on the market, customer experience's and facts must speak for themselves. We took our time and looked at every printer in person, after finding the manufacture that we felt most confident in we took a trip to meet the people involved and take a closer look at the company itself. Kornit was very open to having us out for a visit and helped set up the entire 2 day stay, we were off to Wisconsin.
We wanted to find out several main concerns...
(1) What was this Kornit 921 all about?
(2) How much ink does it use and what about the SCARY "purge and wipe" ink waste costs!
(3) How practical would all of this be for printing t-shirts?
I was met by Paul Borucki and Scott Hopper, they gave me the tour of their facilities and introduced me to the crew. I was more concerned about that 921 I saw in the corner and wanted to jump right into printing t-shirts and learning the system. We discovered one problem, I was a CorelDRAW guy and had ZERO time in Photoshop. I had fired the program up but had done zero real work in it. I did have lots of Illustrator time and that helped convert me over, I was quickly falling out of my confort level.. Scott started answering my machine gun questioning about the 921 and I was looking for weakness, I wanted to identify weakness in the machine. I wanted to somehow just ask the question, "Tell me the TRUTH, whats the gimmick?" Scott continued with a decent demonstration of the machine and we just printed t-shirt designs and I watched the machine in action. I was completely satisfied with the print, it was the machine itself that was my largest concern. After I was satisfied with the 921, at-least as satisfied as one could be considering Kornit had just done this demonstration on their "home turf", I sat down with David Burkowitz. David wanted to make sure I could prepare artwork for the 921, we started with a few files and I started to understand the flow...
The 921 was ordered!
We looked at all the other manufactures, we had a contract almost signed with Brother and now we were hoping we made the right decision!
DELIVERY DAY..
We took delivery of the 921 and opened up the crate to see if it was in there or if it was just a large rock.. Now we just needed somebody to put the thing together. We were advised that the Kornit tech would be "delayed", that was the last thing we wanted to hear even if it was just a handful of days..This gave me time to customize the stand that came with my setup and Kornit had great communication throughout the delay. Eric from Kornit had us up and running quickly once he was able to make it to our shop.
One year after installation we have a lot to say about Kornit, not all of it is good. Sometime we wonder if the Brother machine would have been a better way to go?
Our Problem List:
1. One day after Eric left our shop we had a Cyan vacuum line start filling with ink, we freaked out and then hit the emergency stop button. We cleaned out the line and restarted the system with our fingers crossed and all worked well again, first problem avoided.
2. We had a print head temperature sensor either over heating or mis-reading the temperature. Kornit sent out a new one and I was able to put it into the machine myself, back up and running.
3. A spray pump went out on us for the on-board pre-treatment, I had to hand pre-treat off of the machine (what a joke) for a day until a new pump came in. I was again able to replace this part myself and the machine was up and running. Eric from Kornit has always been a phone call away for tech support when needed.
4. We have had print head clogging but we have always been able to correct the problems. We currently have 2 nozzles on a white print head that are clogged, we are also confident that we could unglog them in 15-30 minutes. Why don't we just unglog them? It wastes a little ink and time, they should not be permanently damaged and we will flush them clean as part of our maintenance cycle.
I think 1 year with a Kornit Breeze 921 is a sufficient amount of time to "get to know" something. The Ink consumption has been amazing, we have the ability to see the ink levels in true liquid form being consumed. We are able to mark the bottles of ink and then have accurate information on ink consumption per job. The purge and wipe is a non-concern, the amount of ink purged is totally controllable and you have full controllability through the Kornit software. We have had very few t-shirts wasted because of the 921 and problems during the printing process. The machine has performed almost flawless for a year straight, we have had about 10-12 prints that did not pass QC. We did give ourselves a fair amount of t-shirts to print as we got to know the machine as part of our own familiarization process.
The 921 has been amazing, you can open all parts of the machine up and stick your head in anywhere (please don't)... All of the issues we have had as a small company Kornit has been there to help, the level of support we have had has been perfect! The t-shirt industry is not easy and the last thing I would want is a manufacture who was never there for me or one I needed all the time because my machine was down. The Kornit, in my opinion, is the only way to go in the DTG world. The on-board pre-t system is amazing, it's a true "flip the t-shirt" out of the box and start printing thing. You are pre-treating and printing everything in one easy pass and the end result is ALWAYS predictable and acceptable.
Jason Lauchner
Co-Owner - ShirtTech.com