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New Seiko Colour Painter Installed
So yesterday we took delivery of our Seiko ColorPainter W-64s, as an upgrade on for our Roland RS-640.
We did consider the colour bar, but for various reasons I posted on the thread about that, I was all set for a Roland RF-640. I was suitably impressed with it at S&D, and my dad (and business partner) was keen to see it for himself.
We headed down to Signmaster, our nearest dealer. The Roland was much like the RS, with a few improvements, I can’t fault Roland as ours never let us down (except two days before it was being part exchanged!)
However, the Seiko was a mighty impressive bit of kit. Just looking at the machine, it’s clear to see it’s well built. The carriage rails for the print head are like steel girders in comparison to the Roland, there’s 6 separate print heads, each made from steel, opposed to Rolands 1 print head, that resembles something from a desktop printer.
Print quality is brilliant, the 6colour configuration we have is excellent, nice bright, dense, vivid colours. The fact you calibrate the feed & bi-direction for Highspeed, Standard, High Quality, mean’s there’s hardly any noticeable difference between settings. Inks from Signmaster are about £85 for 500ml, but genuine inks can be found for around £65 for 500ml from a well know digital printing suppliers 😉 which puts them on par per litre with the 3rd party inks we were running on the Roland.
The other bonus is that it has pre-heaters for warming the media, print heaters, and post heaters, which can be set unto 55 degrees!
Here’s the machine printing high speed, on Metamark MD5. Not sure the exact size of each logo of the top of my head.
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I will try to keep this thread updated as we use the machine more and more, and let you know how we get on with it.
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21 Replies
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She looks great Dave…Well done buddy!
Happy birthday also for yesterday – Hope you didn’t get to wasted
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Nice One David
Happy Printing 😀
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I just hope we’ve got clarity set up right for the new machine, as we’ve quoted on some big jobs today 😮
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I saw these at Sign UK and was really impressed with the prints and colours.
Nice to hear from an owner not just the sellers.
John
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It takes some getting used to knowing where all the setting are.
Will be having the engineer back to take a look as I’m not happy with the amount of times we have to clean the heads.
We can print 1m of vinyl in full colour, then in an hour come to print something else and a nozzle would have dropped, a clean fixes it, the print another job, come to print another and another nozzle/colour is missing, so another clean. Engineer sounded puzzled, and will be coming back to investigate further. Although it was fine over the long weekend. It’s just getting a little frustrating.
Print quality is excellent, printed 4 A1 vinyl prints this AM for a student, enlarged from an A4 jpeg @ 300dpi, and I thought there would be some noticeable pixelation due to the lower resolution than the Roland, however they’re perfect, and the skin tones are excellent, with really rich blacks too. :thumbup2:
I will keep you updated as we progress with the machine.
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We’re absolutely delighted with the print quality coming out the Seiko, and also the speed.
Not sure how accurate sign labs ink estimates are but seems to be good on ink too.
We thought the niggle with the printer dropping nozzles had cured itself, however it’s continuing to happen. It’s nothing major, but really irritates me having to clean the heads multiple times, I’ve already had to empty the waste ink bottle too.
Spoke to Signmaster, and they’re surprised too, it simply shouldn’t be doing it. Their own demo machines sit for weeks and don’t drop nozzles.
Engineer will be with us to get it sorted, so I am impressed with their service, there was no hesitation in getting someone out to sort this minor issue. :thumbup2:
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I looked at the Colorpainter many years ago before i bought our first Roland. and i know it has come along leaps and bounds these days and IS a very good printer. or so i have heard… but one thing i do remember a way back then was it dumped shed loads of ink due to cleans etc. if your changing the waste bottle already ide be very concerned. see how much ink it holds and multiple the cost you pay for that and you have a total on what your binning on top of production costs.
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I would be inclined to agree with you Rob, it does seem to dump a bit of ink. However, it is a colour so it’s going to dump more than the 4col roland we had. We’ve had this niggle which has seen us conduct far more cleans that what should be necessary.
We always over estimate the ink usage on jobs to account for such things, I only said to my dad this morning I may get geeky and measure how much ink it dumps in one clean.
Part of the reasoning behind this post is that there’s very little information available online about Seiko machines, which had me concerned the night after we placed the order. I didn’t find any UK based reviews. I will try to keep things updated as we progress with the machine, and make any comparisons between Roland we had and the Seiko.
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Engineer visited today and has resolved the nozzle issue.
Being lazy I had the head height set to high constantly, just in case of media cockling, it’s suspected that because of this the caps didn’t seal 100% causing some nozzles to block.
Engineer replaced a cap as he wasn’t 100% satisfied with it.
We have 100% nozzles firing and I’ve run 15m of vinyl this pm on high speed and it’s not missed a beat.
Yes I know "you should able to leave the head height at high" but we’re really impressed with the machine.
Did some 20x20mm stickers the other day, and they came out fantastic, nice, rich, solid colours… and that wasn’t even highest quality!
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I was looking at these at FESPA the other day. They look like a serious bit of kit!! I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it in 6 months time as my initial thoughts are that it’s almost too good to be true!!
Stafford
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Hi Stafford,
My main reason for this thread, was that there’s not much online about the Seiko machines, there’s plenty of American reviews but they’re several years old. So my plan is to keep it updated as things progress.
I’d be interested in what makes you think the machine is "too good to be true"?
Last Thursday & Friday we ran out 2 runs of 20 A1 posters, 100% ink coverage on a 200gsm semi gloss paper, it took around 15minutes to print 4 posters at normal quality, and the colours were really strong and vibrant.
No waiting for them to dry, or having a dry time, they came off the machine, straight onto the take up, and then trimmed. :thumbup2:
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Just that they’re solid, good quality output, very fast, low odour and just general a sorted kind of feel about them. I was impressed.
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Exactly what swayed us away from Roland (3 year parts and labour warranty!)
Now the issue with capping not sealing fully is resolved I just need to keep feeding it!
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So we’ve had the machine in for 2 months, and have run about 350m through it in that time, so here’s my little update on how things are going.
It’s fast… despite my dad’s assurances that it doesn’t look to be printing noticeably faster than our Roland, it’s when we compare the times that Clarity produces (relatively accurate to the Roland) against what we’re now doing on the Seiko, it’s consistently 15-20% quicker, especially on PVC banner, we’ve had no complaints about quality, despite not venturing into ‘High Quality’ mode, it’s either High Speed, or Standard.
On the quality front, we’ve had excellent feed back from our customers, we’ve printed a collection of large posters for a trade customer, and feedback from the end user was they’re amazed at the vibrancy of the colours! Another customer was admiring the dense and vibrant Red we printed for some vehicle graphics.
I’ve also been getting my geek on with the logs from VPM, and seeing how much ink we’re using on a job by job basis, it’s economical on ink usage, yes it clean’s more frequently than the Roland, but I’ve even measured the waste ink during a clean and it’s not alarming, especially considering it’s a 6col machine.
Whilst it’s a full solvent machine, the odour isn’t to bad, I’ll admit to doing things we probably shouldn’t like mounting vinyl straight off the machine, and to my surprise it didn’t turn the vinyl into chewing gum.
The best advantage we’re seeing to the Seiko is when printing 200gsm posters (a main part of our business), it prints them quickly, vibrantly, and best of all they’re coming off the machine dry and straight onto the take up, which is saving us endless amounts of time compared to having to set drying times on the Roland.
I’m not having a dig at the Roland in anyway either, it was an exceptional, reliable machine, I’m just continually impressed with the Seiko… the printer I called ‘cr@ppy chinese import’ at S&D when I knew nothing about them… 😳
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That’s an excellent, non biased account of actual usage, and great to hear that you’re so happy with it. As per my previous post, I thought it was a cracking looking machine when I went to see them at FESPA and it sounds like my suspicions were right.
Thanks for sharing, I hope you have many years of trouble free printing ahead.
Stafford
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Thanks for the updates David
There going to be immensely helpful to folk who are considering buying :appl:
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Thanks John & Stafford.
That’s part of the reason for this thread, my dad agreed to the Seiko almost on a wim, we’d never seen or heard of them before we went to view the machines down at Signmaster.
I was somewhat sceptical and a few searches on Google didn’t give me much confidence as the results were mail US users, and years old.
Having committed to investing so much money, with so little information, I wanted to give a UK based, modern review.
I didn’t sleep too well the night we (my dad!) said yes! Little information on what we’d bought and moving from one of the main manufacturers in the industry to a little known brand in the UK.
Signmaster have been second to none with their support.
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Seiko were actually pretty big before the like of Mimaki and Roland came out with their popular printers.
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I was involved in the original 64S and 100S (IP6600 and IP6900??) while I was working at AIT, but the interface on them was so temperamental (SCSI) with Shiraz that the Mimaki JV3 took preference. When I saw them at FESPA this year, I was really impressed. They’re not cheap, at all, but it looks like you get what you pay for.
Stafford
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I was over at a friends firm today and to my surprise he was running the exact same machine.
Matt and the team run some serious prints through this machine…I have asked to get on the boards and add his comments.
His a really nice guy and had some good positives to say about this machine I’m sure his comments will be highly valued here.
One of the things he showed me was the quality of the machine on the lowest setting which was simply amazing.
Hopefully he will jump on an comment
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Yes James, it’s phenomenal at high speed.
I think it’s because unlike the roland where feed and bi directional calibration is set for each media, the Seiko enables you to set it for each media and print speed.
90% of our stuff is printed on high speed.
The inks also seem really dense, we do a fair bit of reverse printed acrylic.
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