If the printer is in good condition with medium-to-low service life on it, and if it's the non-PS model with the spectro, then that price is fair. If it's the PS model, that price is great! If no spectro, take a pass or offer notably lower.
I shot the person a question about its usage and options to see if they'll respond; that'll help me figure out if it's a good bid.
If you get one: replacement heads are $50. There are six of them. Expect to replace them once a year with multi-fandom-level use. More with pro use. Much, much less with just furry use.
Inks are both amazing and annoying. Amazing: the per-mL price is so much lower than any consumer printer could hope to be; nearly a 5x improvement, sometimes more. But the quantities you buy them in make them spendy. Best price is to get the double-packs on Amazon.com. There are *12* carts. Each double-pack costs $90-120. So that's between $1080-1440 of ink for a 'full reload'. The nice part is that it's very good at sipping ink and only using just what it needs, so you only end up replacing a cart at a time, spaced out over the lifespan of the printer, instead of a huge batch of inks all at once.
Knowing how much ink is left in it and how old those inks are definitely have an effect on the used purchase price -- as you can see how much the ink is worth.
If you actually get it, the best thing you can do is leave it on (and covered) in room-temperature storage 100% of the time. It will sleep and sip power. It'll wake up every day or two and do ink-checks and spit-tests, which keep the heads in best condition. If you do this your head service life will double.
Keep in mind: it is a discontinued model. Service is painful and expensive. It's very hard to fix yourself. If its in good condition, tho, the Z series are tanks. Mine's 5 years old and still trucking. I've only had to replace 2 of the six heads, even! I've had one failure that was covered under warranty. Otherwise it would have been an $800 repair.
Speedwise it's definitely not the fastest. Color wise it's near or at the top of the pack; only the 3200 (its brother) really beats it, and that's only barely. Due to the built in spectro it's by far the easiest printer to color correct of any of the pro line printers. Setup and maintenance of new paper stocks is fire-and-forget. Final tweaking takes me 1/8th the time that it did on any of my prior Epson or Canon gear.
Downside: HP is getting out of that market and it shows. The 3200 should have been rev'd two years ago. It's the end of the line for the Z's, I'm afraid. If I had to buy new, I'd buy Canon's high end gear right now... but wow, would I miss the spectro on the Z.
Costs: Considering at-cost inks and fine-art papers it can be as low as $2/sqFt to as high as $4.50/sqFt. Canvas is more like $5-6. I barely charged more than that as I simply printed for fandom to help people get good prints, and had a teeny bit of margin to help pay for the printer over the years. Everything else I took at a loss. If you were to run it professionally you'd need to charge $8/sqFt and up depending on media, which is getting into the pricing of real print shops. And remember, you also need to buy large format cutting equipment, and figuring out how to ship-- which is the worst part of the biz. Solve the cutting/packing/shipping part, and the rest is dirt easy. And if you're not out for PROFIT but just to make the printer pay for itself, you can undercut most anybody's market and get a lot of work.
no subject
I shot the person a question about its usage and options to see if they'll respond; that'll help me figure out if it's a good bid.
If you get one: replacement heads are $50. There are six of them. Expect to replace them once a year with multi-fandom-level use. More with pro use. Much, much less with just furry use.
Inks are both amazing and annoying. Amazing: the per-mL price is so much lower than any consumer printer could hope to be; nearly a 5x improvement, sometimes more. But the quantities you buy them in make them spendy. Best price is to get the double-packs on Amazon.com. There are *12* carts. Each double-pack costs $90-120. So that's between $1080-1440 of ink for a 'full reload'. The nice part is that it's very good at sipping ink and only using just what it needs, so you only end up replacing a cart at a time, spaced out over the lifespan of the printer, instead of a huge batch of inks all at once.
Knowing how much ink is left in it and how old those inks are definitely have an effect on the used purchase price -- as you can see how much the ink is worth.
If you actually get it, the best thing you can do is leave it on (and covered) in room-temperature storage 100% of the time. It will sleep and sip power. It'll wake up every day or two and do ink-checks and spit-tests, which keep the heads in best condition. If you do this your head service life will double.
Keep in mind: it is a discontinued model. Service is painful and expensive. It's very hard to fix yourself. If its in good condition, tho, the Z series are tanks. Mine's 5 years old and still trucking. I've only had to replace 2 of the six heads, even! I've had one failure that was covered under warranty. Otherwise it would have been an $800 repair.
Speedwise it's definitely not the fastest. Color wise it's near or at the top of the pack; only the 3200 (its brother) really beats it, and that's only barely. Due to the built in spectro it's by far the easiest printer to color correct of any of the pro line printers. Setup and maintenance of new paper stocks is fire-and-forget. Final tweaking takes me 1/8th the time that it did on any of my prior Epson or Canon gear.
Downside: HP is getting out of that market and it shows. The 3200 should have been rev'd two years ago. It's the end of the line for the Z's, I'm afraid. If I had to buy new, I'd buy Canon's high end gear right now... but wow, would I miss the spectro on the Z.
Costs: Considering at-cost inks and fine-art papers it can be as low as $2/sqFt to as high as $4.50/sqFt. Canvas is more like $5-6. I barely charged more than that as I simply printed for fandom to help people get good prints, and had a teeny bit of margin to help pay for the printer over the years. Everything else I took at a loss. If you were to run it professionally you'd need to charge $8/sqFt and up depending on media, which is getting into the pricing of real print shops. And remember, you also need to buy large format cutting equipment, and figuring out how to ship-- which is the worst part of the biz. Solve the cutting/packing/shipping part, and the rest is dirt easy. And if you're not out for PROFIT but just to make the printer pay for itself, you can undercut most anybody's market and get a lot of work.