The Sawgrass Solution
If you’re reading this article, you are most likely considering what Sawgrass printer to buy, or you have recently purchased a Sawgrass printer and want to learn more about it. Either way; welcome to the Sawgrass family! Sawgrass printers are designed specifically for sublimation and are built specifically for our ink. Our printers are part of a comprehensive solution that are all built with the other components in mind. Sawgrass offers printers, inks, and software that take you all the way from designing your sublimation project through printing it.
The Sawgrass Printers
Our line of printers includes two different sizes of desktop printers and a large format printer.
Let’s start with our desktop printers. One of the best features of these printers is that the printer does auto maintenance to prevent clogs in the ink lines. Every ten to twelve hours after the printer’s last use, it will push a fraction of one percent of ink through the lines, so the ink never settles in one spot for too long. For the printer to do this daily maintenance, your printer does need to be plugged into an outlet or power strip and should always be powered on. If you do need to turn the printer off for any reason, or if it goes off due to a power outage, just turn it back on as soon as possible. The big thing is to not leave the printer off for multiple days at a time.
When looking at our printer models, the big difference between the SG500 and SG1000 is the sizes of paper that can be printed on with the machine. The SG500 has a maximum width of 8.5.” The US Model of the printer has a Tray 1 that expands. That allows for paper up to 8.5” by 14”, otherwise known as legal paper, in the main tray. Does it appear that your tray will only hold letter size paper? You’ll notice two clips on the front of the tray. You just slide those out of the slots to adjust the tray. You’ll slide them back in when you’ve finished your adjustment. The EU model of the SG500 does not expand and can hold A4 paper in the main tray.
The SG1000 can take up to 11”x17” paper in the main tray. The tray in both the US and EU models does expand to that size. This is also accomplished by sliding out those clips, expanding the tray, and snapping them back into place. The EU Model can take up to A3 paper in the main tray.
You can purchase a bypass tray for both the SG500 and SG1000 printers. The bypass tray on the SG1000 can accommodate paper that is up 13” wide and can handle lengths up to 51”. The most common sizes used in the SG1000 bypass tray would be 12”x18” and 13”x19”. While you can purchase a bypass tray for the SG500, the maximum width is still 8.5”. You can use it with custom cut paper up to 51” long.
Our third printer is our large format printer, the VJ-628. The VJ-628 takes rolls of paper that are 24” wide. This printer uses Sublijet ink but is an 8-channel printer instead of a 4 channel printer. You can have 2 of each color, which we call dual CMYK, or you can use Pro Photo. Pro Photo has 8 distinct colors: the usual CMYK plus additional shades like light black, light cyan, and light magenta. This gives you great skin tones in photographs.
How to Choose a Printer
When you are deciding which of our printers to purchase, you need to consider what you will be creating. The SG500 is perfect for mugs, tumblers, and coasters. Anything where you’d most likely be doing multiples of a small item on the page work great on the SG500 as well; key chains, magnets, ChapStick holders, and car coasters.
The SG1000 is great for larger items like clothing, glass cutting boards, totes, and full bleed tumblers. Generally, if you’re doing anything you’d use the SG500 for, you’d be putting multiple images on the page to maximize the paper. This printer is versatile because it can handle such a large variety of paper sizes in the main tray.
The VJ-628 is a great option if you’re printing very large items like full bleed pillows or totes. Some users also use it for larger scale shirt designs. The other time when the VJ-628 would be a good option is when printing large quantities of small items like
Hopefully, you now have the information you need to choose the right Sawgrass printer. Additional information on our inks and printers can be found under the Help tab at the top of our website. You can find us at sawgrassink.com. You can also use the Help page to open a ticket with our Care Team. Want to connect with me? You can join my group “Rhonda’s Sublimation Corner” in the MySawgrass community. That’s a great place to ask me questions or request a blog post you’d like to read!
