Rollers vs. vacuum press

[simoonez]

This may well have been covered here, probably several times over but I can't find it if it has.
Now, I use a JM34, it gets a fair bit of use and certainly plays a vital roll (no pun intended) in making me money. But I've never thought 'I wish this did more' or 'I wish this did things slightly differently'. Which brings me onto vacuum presses. How do rollers and vacuum presses differ in what they do?
With the entry level Hotpress vacuum press being 4 times the price of the JM34, and taking up a massive area in comparison I can't help but think they must be amazing machines. But what do they do?

[stcstc]

i have a jm54 and HGP260

the JM54 is great for mounting objects, biggest i have done is 10ft *3ft

I find fr lamination you get a better finish from the hotpress. BUT if i had a roller with heat would get the same finish, which would be ideal

decent hot roller laminaitor is 8k + so just havent replaced both mine with 1

[philm]

stcstc

Do you mind me asking if you have had a go at laminating canvas prints with a hot roller machine or seen them done?

I had a HGP360 but found it was too time consuming to do many canvases and have wondered about the idea of using a roll to roll setup with a hot roller laminator, someone advised me that this would not work very well with a Seal laminator though.

Has anyone got any experience of doing canvas prints in this way?

I also found the laminate that I was using made the canvas quite thick to work with, but I imagine there must be thinner laminates available.

Cheers!

[stcstc]

havent seen it done that way

not certain how it would work, as there is nothing to pull the laminate into the texture

if your doing big volume of canvas, a dunk tank coater is the way to go

[Kwik Picture Framing]

Being absolutely honest, I don't think that the extra cost is worth it, so I've never bothered. Certainly I've never encountered problems with the equipment that I use, so if it's not broke.. don't fix it!