I HATE my new printer...

[jmowreader]

Today I went to work, walked in the door and got greeted with "you are not going to believe what the new printer did this time."

This is a "roll to roll" printer, or in this case a "roll to the floor" printer--the fucking takeup motor quit turning about halfway through the job, and there was fifty feet of vinyl, at about $7 per foot, laying on the floor. This is the third time it did it. Fortunately for me, it only ruined two panels--it could have trashed six or seven.

Yesterday it printed through all the media on the roll, then just kept right on printing. It's supposed to stop when that happens.

After I got the vinyl off the floor, I cleaned the printhead, which involves running the head carriage to the "maintenance area" under power, cleaning the rims of the heads with a mild solvent, then running the heads back to the "home position" at the other end of the printer. It got the heads all the way back before the head motor died. I've cleaned heads hundreds of times, and the printer has never died from it before.

Oh, and it can't print a solid patch of color without white streaks in it because it won't feed ink to the dampers fast enough--and this one has the "extra large" ink supply lines that are supposed to solve this problem; maybe they should have put "large enough" lines on it.

My boss spent $22,000 of the company's money on this printer. It has probably fucked up $5000 worth of vinyl since we've had it, and we got it in October.

The head of customer service for the company that makes the printer will be in my shop on Wednesday. He asked me what he should bring. I told him a U-haul would come in handy--this worthless piece of shit is going home with him. Today our shop manager sent an e-mail to our rep at the company that sells us our stuff, and I got to read it. I do not believe I have ever seen the term "piece of fucking shit" used in a business e-mail before.

I need a printer that uses a six-color eco-solvent ink set, has some sort of banding-reduction technology, and takes 64-inch wide media and I have $35,000 to spend. And I do NOT want a fucking Roland. Anyone got any suggestions?

[RushIsRot]

1. I had a wide-bed Hewlett-Packard at my job that worked pretty well.

You might want to look into one of those.

[jmowreader]

2. Hewlett-Packards use the wrong kind of ink

I thought about an HP, y'know? They're nice printers, they're reasonably priced and they work well. But they use water-based ink, and 97 percent of everything I do is used outdoors--which requires solvent-based ink.

I think the Xerox 8265, a rebranded Mutoh Rockhopper 3 Extreme, would be just perfect for my operation, assuming we can find a Xerox dealer that will sell us one--not all of them will, apparently. We are exceptionally familiar with Mutoh printers, and like them lots.

[RushIsRot]

3. Good luck with your search.