Bellise, Bellise Plus, and other RasterGraphics piezo printers from Gretag Imaging.

GretagImaging is the prestigious Swiss company which produces only industrial strength equipment. Gretag owns Macbeth, Onyx Graphics (PosterShop, the #1 selling RIP worldwide).

I attended the Gretag press presentation at Photokina. I have inspected Gretag printers at every trade show that I have found them.

Bellise Sample printed at Photokina, 2000

I am disposed to Gretag, after all, the company is Swiss and sells only to profitable commercial companies. No low end, no iffy equipment anywhere. CymbolicSciences LightJet is another Gretag family product; the LightJet is the Rolls Royce of the photo printers, the unquestioned top photo printer in the world.

Yet so far I have not been able to get excited about either the Bellise or Bellise Plus. The quality is certainly better than the Gerber Orion (formerly the Arizona 30 from Gretag). That is painfully slow and exhibited lots of banding defects when I saw it at a recent SGIA 2000 sign trade show in New Orleans. The Gerber Orion has Xaar printheads and uses solvent inks, so on 3M media you get some longevity without lamination.

The Arizona also uses Xaar printheads, and is actually the only Xaar printhead machine that has passed my critical "eyeball appeal test." My notes even say the output was "very very nice." At another trade show more recently my notes also indicate: "output looked nice." As the FLAAR reviews expand into reviewing more of the printers used for outdoor signs we will begin longer reviews later this year of the various printers which ended up with the name Arizona.

Other printers in the RasterGraphics family, the PiezoPrint 5000, evidently used oil-based ink, sort of a kind of ink that requires special media, is hard to laminate, and the oil inks never really dry (quotes from a presentation by a specialist in all this at The Big Picture Show, October, Palm Springs, California).

I have included the various RasterGraphics printers in the FLAAR report on outdoor production printers, highlighted in green in the list of reports below. The advantage of these FLAAR reports on large format printers is that each report is comparative: all the pertinent printers are compared and contrasted. On the web pages there is space only to just mention the basic printers. The reports run about 4 to 6 pages in length. To get this reports, you are requested to please fill out the "provisional inquiry" form or otherwise express what your background is, what you need to print, and enough clarification from you so we know precisely what reports to send back to you.

Most recently updated July 06, 2001.