Recommendation for a newbie?

[Keith Winter]

Gotta play devil's advocate here...

I'm not understanding how an 80w $35000 Trotec that *may* engrave wood twice as fast as my 80w $4800 Triumph, is a better bargain? If you want any depth at all, I seriously doubt the Trotec will be anywhere close to twice as fast. Superficial, yes, but if you want an 1/8" deep cut, you can only put down an 80w beam so fast to get that done. And while the Trotec will likely be faster, I doubt 2x as fast will happen. I've already proven this to myself with my own machines (my Triumph will engrave wood 3/16" deep more than 3x as fast as my 40w Synrad LS900)

Another factor- I can run FOUR of those 24x16's at one time in my Triumph, vs ONE in the Trotec. This works very well in my situation because I have to keep as many of my 13 machines busy as possible every day. One machine making money running for an hour gives me time to get another machine making money. This may not work if you have one employee per machine. I don't have that luxury. My BIL runs the C2000 and the little ULS laser. Everything else, I do. For me, more machines makes more sense than less but FASTER machines. If you're a one-man-show and want more productivity and have the space, buy a second smaller Chinese machine to run other jobs while the big one is running. And the two machines together will barely cost 1/3 the price of the Trotec.

Finally, as mentioned above, the broken Trotec will cost $5 large to fix. I can replace my whole Triumph for that--

Sorry to sound argumentative, but I've been engraving for 41 years, and have been using lasers for 13 years. As much as I would love a Trotec, I'll never get one because for my needs, it would be a waste of my money. Your needs may vary. But-- the fastest doesn't always win the race...

Wow Kev you're running quite an operation with 13 machines congrats!

in my opinion choosing the right tool for the job is really import especially with your first laser. I do not have a Chinese laser, but I do have 2 trotecs (soon to be 3 with a speedy 400 on order). There is simply no comparison, the quality and support of the Trotec blows away the competition. I just looked at universal, epilogue, and a couple Chinese lasers again last week, what did I do? I bought another Trotec.

Now I will say epilogue was quite nice, but they are not as fast engraving. The Chinese lasers from everything I've read are best for cutting. Not better than the U.S. Machines but yes, a much better value if the majority of what you want to do is cut. You can have 3 or 4 Chinese lasers to the one Trotec / universal / epilogue but you and your team do loose hours when they break, and the learning curve is higher. Not to mention if you engrave like clay is trying to do it's going to take you 2-3 times as long on the Chinese laser and while your machine is busy you cannot take on more jobs. May not be your top concern now, as I read your volume is low, but as you take on more customer and jobs this will become more important.

Kev in my humble opinion you are talking about is apples to oranges to what clay wants. He wants to cut and engrave, you mainly cut I believe? He will have only one machine so when it's down he is 100% down, you have 13 machines, so when one is down you are only 8% down.

Also when you first start learning the laser and have and immediate question to get your job going, U.S. Tech support is a big deal. This fades over time and as you get more experienced, and everyone on here is amazing at answering questions, but we all have slightly different machines. Tech support is still very nice to have for specific machine related questions and issues. Plus when you have one machine and it goes down, you're going to be happy as hell when they overnight you the part and your Trotec rep shows up at the door the next day. Reliability and a three year warranty is worth it's weight in gold at that point. We lost our tube doing the Christmas rush our first year, and this is exactly what happened, we were down less than 36 hours. Had it been longer we would have lost thousands of dollars and hundreds of customers at the most critical time for our business since we only had one machine at that point, we were 100% out of commission. Very happy with how Trotec and Chris our local rep handled that situation in such a timely manner.

Is is there a time and a place for a inexpensive Chinese laser, yes, but I just haven't found that place yet . In all seriousness though I would not go Chinese on your first laser if this is more than a hobby. Maybe your second or third, but not the first one. It doesn't fit what you're trying to do, and having US support is very nice when you need it.