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Versa Camm….first impressions.
Well had the versa camm a week now, here is the verdict so far….
I chose not to have the delivery and install from Roland, it cost another £550. The depot is not far from me so I picked it up myself. Just about managed to fit the crate into the back of my Espace.
Putting the thing together is pretty staright forward and is well explained in the manual.
Installed the windows drivers and colour rip no problems.
Ink installation is very staright forward.Just plug em in.For some reason upon printing a test page the black and cyan didnt work.
I tried ink flushing but this had no effect. I phoned Roland who came out to me the next day.
It seems the problem was a kinked ink supply tube that was fixed in 5 minutes. Apperently this has already been flaged as a problem and the engineer new exactly what the problem was.Iam in the middle of “half vehicle wrap” contract at the moment and the Versa Camm was bought with printing the graphics for the remainder of the vehicles. The problem was the prints coming out of the vesa camm were way better than the prints supplied to me by my previous supplier!!
Iam having to degrade the images by adding noise in photoshop to make them match up. Seems ironic doesnt it??
The rip you get is very good.Lots of options and again well explained in the manuals.
I test printed 20 or so some stickers to see how the print and cut works.
Design work and cutting paths I did in correldraw exported as .eps with the cutting path embeded.
Open the rip and open eps file.
The image comes up with the cutting path shown.
Set media etc.
I test printed 20 of at the highest setting and pressed print and cut.The results were excellent. Print quality at the highest setting pin sharp with no visable dot pattern. Downside is speed though, it can be slow at the high setting. However I tried the quick setting on a photograph iamge and it looked fine.
After printing the print heads slide away and the plotter started cutting.
Again very accurate crisp cutting.I trying to get the hang of printing the images, laminating and then putting back on for cutting. This involves printing some registration marks for the plotter to find. Didnt work the first time but Ill try again in the next few days….where that manual.
Build quality looks very good through out, very solid.
Cutting is a little on the slow side.Iam looking forward to trying out some wacky type effects and drop shadows etc. etc on my next vehicle livery.
All in all Iam impressed so far, it does what is says on the box.
Iam going to try and print a banner in the next few days….now WHERE did i put that friggin manual…
Sorry I cant go into much detail at the moment.
Ill keep you posted.
I
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10 Replies
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What are the physical dimensions of the machine?
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thanks for the ffedback mate.. always good to hear it from someone using one too..
im very glad you and mike have started these threads. like lots of threads on this site submitted by you lot! the answers are very imformative 7 professional for other sign makers to learn from.thank you!
jon, i would imagine the machine dmenssion could be found on rolands site, are they not?
on seeing the versacam in the mags i thought it was very smart & tidy.
theni saw it standing on its stand and thought it very top heavy, and the thought, “why did they stick such a nice machine on one of their old pc60 stands?” 😆 😆 😆 not even the right colour… 🙄 -
Hi Mark
Glad you like your new versacamm.
You can speed up the printing in high quality mode with a little tweak in the RIP. When you go to Print – Setup, to configure your print mode, click the edit button next to Imaging Configuration. On the next Window click the properties button. You get a new screen and one of the options is head speed. Change this from 500 to 1000. You should get a significant speed increase with no visible drop in quality. When you OK all of this, you will be prompted to enter a new name for you new faster preset.
BTW. the VersaCAMM is just under 6′ wide.
Happy prunting !
Regards,
Mike
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Hi Mark,
Glad you like the new machine – as you will have read in the ‘other’ post I still have one of two questions about it… 😉 It’s exciting getting a new piece of kit!
Mike Antrim – what are your views regarding Roland’s on-going claims about output and durability?…as a supplier of sign gear, I’d be interested to hear your views – perhaps you could reply in the ‘other’ post…
more soon
mikethesign
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If the RIP you got is the WASATCH one , another tip to speed stuff up is under print/configuration , just make sure the print head is runing in bidirectional mode , not sure if the Versacam has this , but it also effectively doubles speed on my soljet – often is is not set that but unidirectional.
the Wasatch RIP (ColoRip) is really a potent rip – BUT roland have announced their “new” rip , colorchouce II+ at $1995 – and despite asking em if its better than colorip – I got sort of fobbed off on the forums , cos I was bitching that if it is , why don’t we get it for free. -
Hi Mike,
I’d be pleased to reply to the post in the other group. It is a very interesting thread. I’ll try and post something tomorrow as I’m a little busy right now getting some artwork finished for an advert.
See ya later
Mike Antrum
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The Versacamm is my entry level into the dig printing market and everything it says in the first post is true.
A great machine, a great RIP package, would highly recommend this baby. -
HEY GUYS
Enjoying yours comments on the versacamm. We’re waiting for the sc-500
ex upgrade and we’llkeep you up to speed. Does anyone over there have this upgrade yet?thanks
Rleigh
Raleigh Signs
Lynchburg, VA -
hi mate
please excuse my ignorance but i havent heard of a sc-500 upgrade.
could you give more details please? i would be very interested. 😀 -
Robert
Rodney could do a better job but until he responds here goes.
The original soljet now can be upgraded to do the same function
as the 540ex soljet but it’s slower. Roland will be installing it
hopefully in 3 to 4 weeks. They will install a heater and change the
soljet inks to eco-solvent inks. Also included colorchoice 2.
All for apprx. 4370.00 us dollars. Now it will do the same as a versacamm
also.Raleigh
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