-
Roland colour problems – When is enough, enough?
Hi,
I posted this in the general forum as it’s nothing technical that relates to Roland. Sorry if it’s in the wrong place.
We’ve had a Roland RE-640 for around 11 months. We’ve had lots of issues with colour. The printer can print 2 copies of the same print one after the other, on the same material, same settings, same everything and they will quite often come out different colours (not always but often). Sometimes one end of a print can come out a different colour to the other end. This is a particular problem when printing any kind of tiled output, hoardings, exhibition panels, vehicle wraps etc as the colour difference is quite apparent when the prints are placed side by side.
Roland have been out to fix the issue on 4 occasions. Sometimes the issue will be fixed for a few weeks and then it will reoccur, sometimes it will reoccur the day after the engineers been. We’ve had replacement dampers, new style dampers, a new head, a new capping station (I think), they’ve tried various ways of flushing the ink through the dampers and other things I can’t even remember… and we still have exactly the same problem. As you can imagine this is frustrating and on the last occasion (4th) we asked what they would do if what they were proposing didn’t fix this issue. I was told that at that point we would "have to have a discussion". Well it didn’t fix the issue and I’ve just called them again which is now the 5th time and they want to come out and completely flush through and replace the ink. I asked what would happen if that didn’t resolve the issue and was told they would replace the lines which would be the 6th visit for the same issue.
Is this acceptable? How many visits to fix the same issue is acceptable before they have to admit there is a systematic problem with this printer. Really we want them to replace the printer with one that can print consistent colour. Are we being unreasonable here?
One problem is that because this doesn’t affect all jobs (1 offs, text based signs etc), sometimes the issue won’t rear it’s head for a month or two so it appears the issue has been fixed but in reality it’s just not noticeable on those jobs. If we were always printing long full bleed graphics that needed to match then I’m sure we’d be at this point months ago but as it is, we only have around 1 month of warranty remaining.
Does anyone have any advice?
Sorry for the essay.
-
2 Replies
-
I wouldn’t worry to much about the one month remaining on the warranty.
If this has already been logged on there system as an ongoing issue then they will have to resolve this for you.
I have copied your post to a Roland senior so they know exactly how your feeling about this… I wouldn’t panic to much they are a straight up company and hate having customers that are upset or have issues that are not resolved.
Many Thanks
-
Hi James, thanks for the reply and forwarding to Roland.
I know Roland are a good company. We bought this particular printer because it’s a simple no fuss machine backed by a decent company but this colour issue is really limiting what we can do with the machine and we’re having to move work to other machines because we just can’t trust it.
If this was you, would you allow a 5th attempt to fix this?
My opinion is that if I bought a TV for instance and every time I watched a film the picture went a strange colour, I would take it back to get it repaired / replaced. If the same fault occurred again I’d expect my money back. If it had been repaired 4 times and the same fault occurred again all within the initial 1 year warranty period, I don’t think I could reasonably be expected to accept another repair.
Log in to reply.
