Onyx or sai or Roland print studio what to go for?

[Daniel Evans]

Roland print studio will only run Roland so you’ll have to rule that out.

[Shawn Bentley]

Hi Daniel, I was told the new one that’s available for Mac will run other machines is that wrong then mate? Cheers if so ruling out [emoji23]

[Daniel Evans]

I looked into this recently, basically as far as I’m aware, Roland Print Studio is a cut down version of Caldera and will only run roland machines. I’d love it if it did run others as I’ve been looking into this as it’s fraction of the cost of Caldera but don’t think it does.

[Shawn Bentley]

thanks daniel,will keep posted cheers.

[Lee Reeves]

I have been told by a reliable source that a new version of versaworks is being developed for release this year. It will have add on modular you can purchase that may be able to run other plotters, flat bed cutter and routers. If not Onxy or efi rips are both very good but not many profiles for them.

[Shawn Bentley]

thanks lee, appreciate that maybe look into that then cheers.

[Iain Pearson]

Hi Shawn, I’ve recently purchased a new Summa Cutter and SAi software.
I have always used flexi for cutting but now using the rip and find it ridiculously easy to use.
So far so good [emoji106]

[Shawn Bentley]

Cheers Ian that’s good to hear cheers was the rip expensive?

[Alex Crosbie]

Roland print studio only runs roland printers but does allow you to run any other manufacturers cutter.
I have it running the EJ640 and summa s160 cutter. This was the setup recommended to me by roland when I said I was interested in the GR640 cutter.
Even roland admit (though probably not on paper) that the accuracy and reliability of the the summa cutter is better than the roland.
I’ve been running this setup for over a year now.
The rip is indeed a rebadged version of the caldera rip.
To be perfectly honest It has its pros and cons.

Pros:- ability to run any cutter, super fast rip speed(all jobs rip in seconds no matter the size), handles PDFs with transparency effects, has some clever features with the ability to adjust all kinds of things like even down to the orientation of the cut file when it’s printed. Add on grommet marks on banners, tiling is much more advanced. You have much more control over the speed and quality of the machine than with versaworks.

Cons:- support is not as good (roland haven’t used it much and the one guy that was brilliant has left to work elsewhere) if the support is above Roland’s knowledge then you have to contact caldera who are extremely good but sometimes they dont fix all faults, just the ones they feel like! Caldera are French so language barrier can sometimes be an issue.
You need a mac to run it.
The workflow and way it operates are totally different to versaworks and will take quite some time to adjust to, we still find some features really frustrating and counter intuitive. Updates are not always better, we updated to the latest software a few months back and went from a stable working environment to lots of crashes, we had to roll back to a previous version which wasn’t straight forward. Profiles are not readily available, I think there’s around 60 on the roland profile centre and most of these are for 3M materials.
Loading profiles is not a simple process. Installing the software and printer is a step by step process following written instructions as some steps are not intuitive. Oh and you have to pay for it!

I would seriously look at some of the other aftermarket rips as the way that print studios work flow is setup is its biggest problem for me.

If you want to see what it’s like in a live environment and setup a job then I have teamviewer on my Mac and you can have a watch to see how it works or if you’re down in Gloucestershire anytime then you’re welcome to pop in.

Cheers

Alex

[Shawn Bentley]

Hi Alex
Thanks for taking the time to write all this info, really is helpful mate and answers a lot of questions, I use only macs so good there will look into this properly I think, may take u up on the team viewer at some point thanks again mate appreciated