Well, to Oce's defense this machine is over eight years old. For 140K you'd think they'd last longer. Having said that, it sounds like it has outlasted most. Also, they (Oce') did call back to our in house tech today. They re-iterated the communication cable as a possibility and also the mother board. We have both on order.
For the sake of informational purposes can you please explain why you don't think it sounds like a motherboard/processor/hard drive issue?
Thanks a ton for your response! If you're able to come up with anything else, it would be greatly appreciated.
I will update once the new parts are installed.
Here is an example of the garble.
Ours is 5 years old and has had a massive amount go wrong with it. It is quite a cheap printer compared to others in the 800K to the 1 million dollar mark and was probably abused by previous owners. We look after it and truth be told, very little has gone wrong, since we replaced pretty much everything. Haha
I've got a feeling perhaps Oce are refering to a different motherboard, over the standard computer motherboard in the Oce to run the printer's user interface. Yours could be different, but ours has an internal computer that runs the UI which connects to various other control mechanisms next door to the computer that runs the UI, stores your jobs and forwards commands on to the appropriate devices running the equipment.
- The hard drive is there for the OS, jobs, storing settings...ect. I highly doubt this has anything remotely to do with the issue as it does not directly interface with any mechanisms relating to the problem you are describing. If your hard drive was faulty, you most likely would not be able to start the printer at all.
- The motherboard is an integral part of the operation of the computer, but as far as I know...Nothing to do with the part that does the printing.
- If the processor was faulty, you would definitely know about it, haha! If you're able to boot the OS and use the printer's UI, I'd say that was working just fine.
What I'm thinking is, there is a problem communicating between the computer and the printer's basic control interface which is causing the problem. It could well be as simple as a cable, but your garbled noise that you see when printing suggests a far worse scenario. It could be one of the control mechanisms needs replacing or it's firmware re-flashed. In other words, the computer and the cable connecting to the device that runs the printer is fine, but the device itself is faulty, which is why you've had no luck in fixing your problem.
I'm not sure if one firmware package controls all mechanisms for say the lamps, the heads, gantry motion...ect. Or if the computer software interfaces with many different devices with different firmware packages that would need to be re-flashed separately by Oce or your service company.
I hope all of that makes sense, I'm in a bit of a rush!
