I am so Tired Of SKEW problems. I have been using this Color Pain-in-the-a** 64 for over a year now, and have been through many frustrating problems dealing with banding, roll-up issues, expensive ink, and the ever so maddening EXPENSIVE MAINTENANCE FLUIDS! But my Biggest Pet pieve of all is SKEW PROBLEMS!!!!!!!!! I have wasted tons of Material and ink, and ink and material, and time, and all in all, I have more waste than actual sellable product. I am not one to complain a whole lot, I usually deal with things relatively smoothly... but Now I had to search the internet to find the real problems with the machine, only to find that everyone else on here is also having relatively the same problems I am. Everything I hear from distributors, and magazine articles, is that this printer is great, and has hardly any problems at all, so I thought maybe I just got a lemon? but I see there are others out there as pissed off as I am. ..Now about my skew problem. I am a fanatic at lining up this machine, making sure the media has the same tightness at both sides when I load, and that it is centered over the completely misaligned sticker that came on the thing, but anyway, I still get skew errors halfway into my 11' job which completely wastes 6' of 54" material every time. I know the machine well, I'm a veteran at loading the material. I am not a retard, but whoever designed this machine with .2" skew error is a retard. If Seiko thinks their machine is so perfect, that they need only .2" of skew tolerance, then they should buy back all the ink and material that I have wasted on this Pile of crap.
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Wasted Time Wasted Materials Wasted Ink... I think it's time for REAL Fixes!
on what kind of material do you work? how do you load material? how do you align it?
i use simplest way: put and push material through printer, then manually but slowly pull it back, holding it by plastic holders. in that way material align it self... and than i push down leveler...
never had skew problem...
maybe your roll holder is not parallel with printer - check it.
you have to check obvious things - solutions - and than complain..
machine can be with mistake, but you as user have to see what's wrong...
it's the fastest and simplest solution...
when you know what's wrong then you can complain - and then you can expect help...
i know this from my experience - i got help when i sad "this is problem"...
I load the same way you do, except I even go as far as looking to make sure the material lines up evenly across the holes to make damn sure it is aligned, then I make sure that the material has the same amount of "slight slackening" on both sides to make sure the roll is centered correctly. I feel that I take as much precaution as humanly possible to make this right, and to make the machine track straight, AND... WITH AS MUCH MONEY AS I HAVE WASTED WITH THIS MACHINE, I CERTAINLY HAVE THE RIGHT, AND OBLIGATION TO WARN OTHERS ABOUT MY PROBLEMS WITH THIS MACHINE. AND DUHHH, DO YOU THINK THAT I DON'T TRY TO FIND A OBVIOUS PROBLEM WITH THE MACHINE? Maybe the roll holder is not parallel with the machine, maybe it's off by 3 thousanths? So maybe I should pull out my 3 thousand dollar laser guided 2 foot calipers and measure that out. I'm sure it shows me how to do just that if I read my manual carefully. I've already asked for help from Seiko, they have me try a million things and waste more time until it finally tracks through my 1 job, (by heavenly intervention of course) and then they think it's fixed, and then my next long job has the same problem, and then after the 4th or 5th try, It finally gets through a job. I have asked Seiko to provide a larger skew tolerance maybe double what it has currently, but that hasn't happened, nor has a way to turn the skew sensor off. Both of these solutions would work, but they have not done either, so since they have not provided a solution to fix this flaw in design, I can go ahead and complain and you can go ahead and blame me for not seeing the obvious 3 thousanths misalignment of my roll holder. This skew problem is hit and miss. Either way the tight skew tolerance is stupid.
And of course you've NEVER had a skew problem, cuz you load the material perfect, with one finger even... blindfolded. Is so friggin easy, it practicly loads a skew-free job by itself!
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Wasted Time Wasted Materials Wasted Ink... I think it's time for REAL Fixes!
The new firmware allow you to chose either to continue printing or stop because you have skew problems wich are rare in our case. Have the seiko agent check your machine?
on the end they will solve and prevent most of their problems...
inks are cheaper every day... lot of seiko users are coming out from warranty, 3rd party inks are better and better every day, they'll have to lower their prices..
look nur for example: their inks buy only people who are under warranty period, after that adios nur
I'd like to see cartridges that don't have chips in them.... friggin bastards. Now Seiko and HP are coming together, and I only see things getting worse.
the potz, please let un all know how the firmware works for you. if your skew problem is real bad then yes the firmware will give you an option to continue, but this may only open more problems. skewing media causes ripples to appear, then possible head strikes, possible weird looking images due to the skew happening etc etc.
i've never seen a 64s skew badly, but i've seen what happens when skew occurs down to the feed not being horizontal to the bed. not saying this is your problem, but i am surprised that seiko haven't taken this a bit more seriously and camped somebody at your door to diagnose what's causing it.
remember my first posts about my Seiko? i had terrible skew problem.
but someone finally told me to check if the section on the front of the machine, which consists of the two metal bars and those sliding media holders, is screwed to the machine completely parallel. and it wasn't!!!!!!!!!!
plus, obviously, my sticker on the front side, which should help me align media, was also skewed!!!!!!!
but... thepotz - why don't You just stick a piece of foil over the two sensors? it's so simple........
we don't have the new firmware yet - we just:
1) corrected the skew of the machine 2) align media just by pulling in the middle 3) stick a piece of vinyl over the sensors...
