My machine ran perfect when we first got it. We ran through I dont know how much material for a year. At the beginning of this summer I started noticing banding in my prints. I tried all kinds of stuff to make it better with no avail. I called my rep who called the tech guys. I sent some samples in and they said everything looked ok, must be my profile. It was the same film I had been printing on, but I went through the whole set up to profile and adjust the feeds, heat etc. still way more banding than I felt was acceptable. A couple of weeks ago, my black print head started spraying a fine mist around anything black. I called the rep and really started complaining. Finally they decided that a service tech needed to come out and work on the machine. We did have to replace the print head, but it still wasnt quite right. To make a long story a little shorter, He found the carriage height wasnt quite right. He wasnt sure how it could get out of adjustment, since thats not something that we could mess with. He fixed that and ran through all the adjustments, spent a couple of hours fiddling. When he was done, my printer was back to making perfect prints again. I had forgotten how well this printer can print even in fast print modes. You cannot see any banding in our prints now. I once agin am very happy with this machine. A couple of months ago I was seriously looking at getting rid of it and buying something else.
Thats what worked for me. I dont know if that will cure anyone elses. But a Seiko CAN print banding free.
with the right substrate, profiles and correct printer settings, the printer should be able to print in both 4-pass and 8-pass band free. 2-pass is a bit hopeful, but on a banner or matt substrate, it's possible.
what materials have you had luck with in 4 pass mode?? are you running the external dryer?? we have found that the external dryer dries out the printheads in 4 pass mode!
we've run sav (md5), banner and various textile substrates. we do struggle sometimes on certain flat colours being blue's and red's, but that is just the colour-order banding that is more evident in these colours. everything else was perfect.
the dryer can cause drying but i've only seen this on the black head as this is nearest the heat. apart from that no real issues with the dryer. we only use the dryer if we're running banner at 16sqm, otherwise the prints are dry by the time they get to the take-up.
My experience with my seiko printer is that it can go south on you at any time. Mostly during a critical time job. I use it for banner printing only. Can't trust it on any other type job. I got a Roland that sits side by side my Seiko and I run the money jobs on the Roland and the junk jobs on the seiko. Now that it costs $6000 for a year warranty I am going to try and run third party inks that cost $100 a cartridge less and just pay out of pocket if I need a tech to come by. But everytime I had it serviced it would work great for a little while and then whammy it would just be a monster to deal with. My Roland has been making me money for over 2 years now and only one service call.
