AnaJet® mPower Garment Printer Review

Here's a taste of the press release for the New High-Speed industrial Garment Printer from AnaJet (back in 2014)

The mPower mP10 being demonstrated at the show prints a typical color graphic in about 34 seconds. The entry level mP5 requires about double that time, keeping pace with the fastest digital apparel printers.

“Both mPower printers use specially-engineered industrial-strength print heads to increase production speed, significantly reduce clogging, and eliminate costly maintenance cycles,” said Don Rasmussen, co-founder and Director of Engineering at AnaJet, Inc. “As a result, users can rapidly print one-off designs for market testing or reel off hundreds of units in a day, with little or no downtime during the workday.”

AnaJet created the mPower line to support businesses in the screen printing, embroidery, promotional product distribution, quick print shop and sign making industries. “mPower offers a compelling value proposition to these businesses,” said Greg Nathanson, President of AnaJet, Inc. “No other garment printer manufacturer can offer the combination of speed, production readiness, durability and customer support at this price point.”

The mPower’s industrial-strength print heads tolerate high-pressure cleaning, which means less manual maintenance and downtime for cleaning. In addition, the advanced closed-loop ink delivery system enables ink recirculation for all channels. That means less clogging, less maintenance and more precision printing.

The new printers also offer total control of ink flow and ink drop size, which enables users to determine the ideal saturation for prints. Print settings for 300, 600 and 1200 dpi reproduce stunning colors and brilliant whites. AnaJet’s PowerBRIGHT™ water-based, pigmented CMYK and white inks show up equally vibrant on light and dark garments. They reproduce beautifully on cotton, cotton blends and other general purpose printing substrates.

Questions Received 

1) From what I've been reading one of the major problems with DTG is white ink.  It clogs, has to be run every morning, has lots of maintainance involved, and there are head cleans roughly every 10 shirts. My question with the mpower is how much of these problems do you experience? Clogs/Maintainence compared to your previous DTG machine?

ANSWER - White, with it's heavy pigment load settles faster. With the recirculating system on the new platform this should not be an issue. Shaking the carts or stored ink is still needed.

2) It would seem that a good deal of the white ink on any DTG machine would be wasted, costing hundreds if not thousands of dollars just in maintaining the white ink capability each year. Mpower has really only been out for a few years. IS there truly a large difference in the amount of wasted white ink or are you still wasting white ink?

ANSWER - On older machines large amounts of ink are expelled to a) keep heads "wet" and b) to mix ink in the lines from the carts to the head assembly. The head will still "spit and wipe to keep the nozzle open, but the greatest waste is eliminated because of the recirculating loop. As has always been the case.... themore ink you put on shirts, the less that wil go into the waste container.

3) How much ink is in the Mpower ink work better than the old inks? Any difference in quality? I have some samples from Anajet and after 5 washes it seems to hold well. A bit of fading on the dark shirt samples, but not as bad as other samples I've had from other companies. However, these are on ringspun cotton and I didn't ask for samples on open end cotton tees yet. The tighter knit makes for a better print quality.

ANSWER -  It is thicker, so it is conceivable that less will be used for the same amount of coverage. CMYK by design is translucent so the color strength will depend on how smooth and even the substrate is no matter if it's white ink base or a smoother knit.