I am so glad I found this forum because I really want to vent my frustrations with this P.O.S.
My employer bought ther floor model printer about a year ago and I have been doing all the printing since.
Here is a list of compliments. #1 If everything works perfect it prints reasonably nice prints.
Okay now to the complaints. I do alot of big printing. Mostly about 4' X 6' Excuse me if some of this sounds like a raving lunatic because I have just gotten 5...NOPE NOW 6! paper jams in a row!!! I am sooo pissed. Of ****ing coarse this happens after printing about 4 feet of print!!!!!!!!!!!
First off. Has anyone successfully gotten their take up roller to successfully roll up a large print without ruining it??? I have done this once. But even in 8 pass and with the external heater the prints always get ****ed up by being rolled. Okay thats fine so whats the alternative... why a makeshift table of coarse. I am sure most of you have some table getting fed prints. Hmmm maybe someone should of thought of how to get the prints from the machine wothout ****ing them up. Oh well.
Why does it SOMETIMES feed about 3' of material before printing??? It does this only sometimes. Hmm makes you wonder about how much extra paper you have to buy.
Sorry I have to go try again to print ONE FUCKING LETTER without it getting ****ed up again.
First of all, please log in, so that you are not anonymous. We don't like to help if someone doesn't want to share even the most basic pieces of information, like where u are located etc, plus, what is more important, when you are not anonymous, you get confirmations on your email box that someone has actually replied to your message.
Secondly, count to ten and try to breathe normally. All i can promise you is that for many of us here Seiko is probably the least problematic machine of all, and i bet that there might be some trouble with yours that is easily corrected. Paper jams... well i don't know what you are referring to - your media got wrinkled and the head strikes it? Then either you set the temperature wrong, set the media in a skewed way, or you're not using your vacuum at all. Let us all know what media, what width, what temperatures you are using. Your venting is worthless without these pieces of information. Some of us had Seikos delivered with the media alignment sticker skewed (that takes a minute to correct). Some of us had Seikos delivered with the paper feeder misaligned (that takes 3 minutes to correct).
So don't worry, breathe normally, log in, provide us all with those vital and essential pieces of information and just relax.
whoooa, sounds like somebody is running the unit without mush training. something fundamental is wrong here, whic as joshie quite rightly noted, that if we know who you are, where you are, the help will be forthcoming.
i know for a fact that seiko monitor this site, as our rep told us!! so you've either got a really bad printer or,as i think, there are a number of fundamentals not right. i can gaurantee, that with the correct info, we could have you printing again within a day. easy..
We have Vutek's, HP's, Encad's, a Durst Lambda and flatbed from Arizona. We have also got the Seiko 64 colourpainter. We knew when we bought the Seiko that the price of the ink was twice the price of Mimaki ink and about eigth times more than the Vutek ink.We accepted this due to the fantastic quality of the print and the wide color gamut. Thats where the good part of the story ends.
This is the most unreliable piece of equipement we have ever come across! We are very experienced and the issues we have got are not user issues. The print heads and the ink from Toyo/Seiko does not seem to agree with each other.
Countless service calls and head changes. This has been ongoing for over a year and we have lost faith. No, we are not paying for these service calls, still we have wasted lots of expensive ink and media. Also the company that sold us the machine has tried to get us to sign a service agreement worth 500 dollars per month. You got to be kidding! We also know that our experience is not an isolated incident.
I really don't envy you. It's funny how some people claim it is the best and most reliable machine they ever used (like us) and some claim something opposite. Where is the trick?
Our experience is not isolated. I know of at least three sites that are experiencing similar problems. I have also been told by the people who sold me the machine that some of the inks did not agree with the heads. Pigments got stuck and killed the heads. I do not see our situation as "funny", just very frustrating!
Joshie, did you not post a question about any golden rules on how to use a Seiko on the 25th of Julyin the Mimaki forum. Does that mean that you have all of three months of experience with the Seiko? I would just like to put your thoughts and experience in perspective.
Actually yes. Three months. Not one problem with ink or heads. Nada. But you see, we put a lot of strain on the Seiko, many different media, different modes, my forgetful employees (= ripples = carriage strikes), and 24/7 operation (we never switch it off - NEVER!!!) - more than 3 running miles of media printed in less than two initial months, using 60 cartridges of different batches.
I never had that kind of peace with any other machine we had. Plus, i never heard about any ink-compatibility problems. I believe this must have been a similar accident that we had with our other machine - the inks were probably transported in a freezing environment - anyway the pigments sort of coagulated and this resulted in all four Xaar500 heads being stuck. And i believe the 500s are a "bit" more expensive than the heads in Seiko, right? ;)
joshie wrote: Actually yes. Three months. Not one problem with ink or heads. Nada. But you see, we put a lot of strain on the Seiko, many different media, different modes, my forgetful employees (= ripples = carriage strikes), and 24/7 operation (we never switch it off - NEVER!!!) - more than 3 running miles of media printed in less than two initial months, using 60 cartridges of different batches.
I never had that kind of peace with any other machine we had. Plus, i never heard about any ink-compatibility problems. I believe this must have been a similar accident that we had with our other machine - the inks were probably transported in a freezing environment - anyway the pigments sort of coagulated and this resulted in all four Xaar500 heads being stuck. And i believe the 500s are a "bit" more expensive than the heads in Seiko, right? ;)
Hi Joshie, I would love to own a Seiko like yours. Lets hope that it contiously performs for you as so far for the next three months. Maybe the more recent models are of better build quality? Out of interest, what other machines have you got experience with? I guess if your earlier experience was an old Salsa/Nur, then I understand that the Seiko is reliable in comparison.
frip, sorry for jumping back to this issue, but you said that the pigment in the ink was killing the heads. was this geniune seiko ink, and if so what colours were effected, or were they all? never heard of the inks effecting the heads, only during the dodgy batch of light cyan approx 8 months ago. what sort of failures were you getting? could you recover the heads with cleans?
With a machine with such a poor performance record you would have to be nuts to try anything but Seiko/Toyo inks. Our supplier told us that the first lot of relaesed heads were not a great match with the Toyo inks and the heads deteriorated rapidly. -Yes, there was also the word that a Cyan batch was a part of the problem. By the way, ink effecting heads is in general the most common reason for head failures discounting head strikes or poor maintenance.
-No the heads could not be recovered!
If the supplier thought we had anything to do with the poor performance of this machine we would have a service bill beyond the cost of the machine! Slight exaguration, still the amount of ink and material we have wasted is very bad news. Yes, we have also been offered some "free ink" in compensation for our utter misery!
