We are new to the Seiko 64s and the reason we bought is was for the speed. We have yet to see the performance that it boasted. Is this speed dependant on the media? We seem to be getting around 80-100 sq ft an hour. Would this be consistent with the rest of you?
make sure you have your settings on the standard 720 4 pass mode...............in the media information on the printer panel, your print mode should be in NORMAL.............sounds like you are printing in HIQUALITY mode which is the 8 pass.........
or
your scsi cable could be flawed
or
your computer could be to weak of a processor or bogged down by other applications while you are printing........i have noticed if my RIP is doing both the operations of printing a file and riping another new image, it will affect the speed of the printer....but not much, i have a hog of a rip cpu with 2gigs of ram and dual 1.7pent4's....
...the Seiko is not like an Arizona in that it does not have an internal hard drive that the ripped print file gets sent to for printing......the Seiko print progression comes directly from the cpu......thus the rather high speed scsi connection..........
what is your RIP?......if you have a basic rip then i might think about upgrading......you get what you pay for when talking about programs in IMO.........
as soon as i got my first Seiko I physically timed the production print time for a particular 4x4 product i print alot of..............i found that my first Seiko was at what i figured out to be 173sqft an hour.................my second Seiko seemed to be just a bit faster at 175sqft an hour.........
but i have not done the same math for the HIQUALITY print mode speeds just yet........but that would make some sence to me that HI mode is about 55-65% the speed on the STANDARD print mode speed...........
Your printing in 8 pass mode. Most Rips now control the printer settings. Dig into your printer setting on your rip and make the change to Normal, Bi-Directional for the media setting you are using. This is true in Onyx. Also, if your using a 64bit SCSI card such as that of a 29160 and you have it in a 32bit PCI slot, your sending data slower to the printer, but you still should be clocking in at 169-174 sfph at 4 pass bi-directional mode.
We get exactly the speeds that are in the specification, of course it all depends on how wide the media are. A rough calculation for 40" media will be approx 141 sqft/h as opposed to the 176 sqft in case of full width 64" media. We printed a 36" wide file on a 42" inch media in high speed and it was 291 sqft/h rather than 345 sqft you can get with 64" inches. It all depends on how fast the carriage returns. In some small machines it goes very fast, however the bigger the machine, the heavier the carriage, so the return must be smoother and slower. Plus quick return would shake the ink too much. Therefore the narrower the media, the relatively more time is spent during each pass for carriage return.
Plus, as someone said before - get a good PC or Mac, use a decent RIP, and you should get no hiccups. Cuz honestly - if you havent got enough memory and disk space and processing power, then the faster you will go, the more data must be sent to the machine in the same time period, therefore whenever there occurs a hiccup, you're bound to have the carriage stop and the machine wait for new data. Seen this at the presentation, we've been warned, so we got a good pc and with Caldera rip it is a breeze.
