Nige, Nothing yet! But I did receive the "Improvement Kit" about 10 days ago. I have not opened the boxes yet, I'm supposed to wait for Seiko to come and install the parts. As for the dual roll, my attorney is doing some investigating because we were all sold these machines with dual roll printing! Not buy the machine and we'll let you know when we have it! So i'm starting to loose my patience. What do we get in return for the wait? I've had my machine since August,2005 and have not heard a thing, I also sent an e-mail and left a voice message for the Seiko tech who installed my printer and gave me his card and he has not called me yet either.
we've got the kit which just gives diferent roll holders and larger flanges to ensure equal take-up. worked wonders to cure the banding issues we had but still desparate for the dual roll option.
We're scheduled for dual roll install the end of this week. I have a tracking number and the parts were shipped from Texas last week, so I should have it by Tuesday. Once I'm hooked up i'll let you guys know how it works.
We just got our new machine installed last week. The dual roll option seems a bit overhyped, but it did work. I work at a smaller shop, so I don't see myself using the option that often, but if you run a lot of volume it seems to be a good option. I did not really like how the take up was arranged though. There are two ways of setting up for dual roll printing, but only one seems viable. The first option is to run two rolls on the same feed, but the rolls have to have the same amount of material on them for this to work. The second option is for if you want to run two rolls of different length (eg. one 50 yard roll and one 20 yard roll). The set up for the second option is borderline ridiculous as it involves loading two seperate feed reels and adjusting the tension on the second roll with a wrench.
Isn't the dual roll option supposed to allows side by side rolls- i.e. two 48" wide rolls side by side? Maybe I'm missing something. I also thought you could print two separate files on each roll- which would be handled via the rip- I use onyx- haven;t explored this yet- and maybe I'm wrong- but that's how I interpreted that functionality.
You are correct, you run two rolls side by side. However, if you do this, you have to run rolls of the same length or they will roll off slack at different rates and cause the machine to think it has run out of material. There is another option to run a second roll off of the sub-scroller, but it is far too complicated to be of any real use.
You are also right about printing two different images. The challenge lies in how you want to organize your work. The rip essentially sees two rolls as being the same as one large roll. Then you have to adjust for the gap in between the two rolls and tell the rip to space the two images that far apart. I run Postershop too, but I haven't really played around with how this will work yet. We got it to work on a test run by adjusting the space between copies, but it changes the vertical spacing too. I haven't found a fix for that yet, but I haven't really tried either.
