Sublimation Printers
At press sublimation, we’ve categorized sublimation printers based on their intended use to make it friendly for everyone to get what they want quickly and easily. We’ve kept small units for beginners, cricut, and mug sublimation. However, for a wide-format printer, we had to go to the commercial side, where we discovered big sublimation units from HP, brother, and Epson. These are bulky units with price points around $50,000 – $100,000.
A Sublimation printer is a backbone of any sublimation business without which it ceases to exist. Sublimation printers use specialized piezo head technology, which dries the ink so the design can be pressed on a final substrate.
Previously, we had Ricoh and Sawgrass as a desktop sublimation printer–and this dates back to 2010 when we shifted our crafting setup to sublimation. After 4 years, Ricoh stopped their production and as we started our queries, we found that it partnered with Sawgrass.
During that time, we experimented with sublimation ink with an Epson inkjet printer, which was so successful that we converted four of its models.
Epson and Sawgrass, as of 2022, is leading the sublimation market. They‘ve the best units for Cricut and heat-press. Many of our mugs, T-shirts, and tumbler sublimation are backed by both these brands.
In the wide-format printers, we’ve taken a few of these commercial units–but since price is a legit concern, we took budgeted models under $20,000.
Speaking of price, we further brought cheap sublimation printers separately–and it was the hardest part of our journey–because most were junk and we never wished the same for anyone.
Our categories aren’t limited to the budget range, and compatible supplies. We further divided the printers based on what is best for T-shirts, what for mugs, and which one is the best for tumblers–so we cater to everyone precisely. Let aside the Epson sublimation printers, which took a good 3 months testing each of their units and wasting our thousands of dollars, only to find out their Ecotank and WorkForce is the only series of printers compatible with sublimation. However, they’ve introduced read-to-go sublimation printers in the late 2021–all of that we’ve covered in the blog.
In each of our blogs on the sublimation printer, we aim to focus on the printer’s performance, durability, and how the user can make the best of units. The separate blog is to further help the community go and check the reviews of only those units that they’ve been looking for. And by this, we try to provide as much information about every ins and out of each unit as we can, through our personal expertise, research, reviews on Amazon, Reddit, and sublimation forums.
However, we avoid exaggerating the unboxing and installing process–unless it’s very essential and something really intrigued us that you should know. Because most of the time, unboxing has nothing new, the accessories and supplies mentioned in the description arrive as it is. So it’s wasting yours and our time. Instead, we focus on telling you the statistical data, availability, and how the printer will live up to your needs, besides the technical malfunctions you need to bear.
So, we hope each of our review blogs is helpful to you in a way that we intend it to be. Getting you the best unit that can carry your work smoothly and yields profits is all that we aim for here.
