ForgeInc
New Member
We are getting close to our 2 year anniversary with this machine, and am curious to hear other users experiences with it. What inksets do you use? Primary types of media? How often do you run it?
I ask because after 2 years of ownership we have had a long series of problems with ours. We run it hard, 2 full shifts a day when busy. We have rarely been able to run production mode at a sellable quality, so the speeds that were promised to us haven't materialized. We also were told the machines were very reliable, with a very small percentage of printhead failure reports, (we were told something like less than 1 percent? Can't remember exactly, but it was a tiny reported amount of printhead failure.) I believe we have replaced like 8-10 heads on ours since we bought it?
All that said, Canon as a company have been pretty good to us, and all in all they seem to want to take care of us, just not sure their equipment delivers what they say it would. They actually agreed to completely replace our first machine, but the new one hasn't faired much better. We have had techs out here so many times, we actually became trained to perform a lot of the service tasks ourselves, just to avoid downtimes.
I could go into more specifics and problems, but the real reason I post this, is I am questioning - is this normal? Is it just expected in our industry that these large format, flatbed printers (regardless of brand) will on average be down anywhere from 8-15 times a year if you run them as hard as we do? To clarify, we do ALL the maintenance, cleaning, etc that is required, usually even more so. All our machines are on service contracts as well. OR...is this specific machine truly just not a performer?
Can anyone else chime in? I would love to hear success stories of people running the heck out of their equipment, without any major downtimes - regardless of specific printers brand/models. Anyone?
I ask because after 2 years of ownership we have had a long series of problems with ours. We run it hard, 2 full shifts a day when busy. We have rarely been able to run production mode at a sellable quality, so the speeds that were promised to us haven't materialized. We also were told the machines were very reliable, with a very small percentage of printhead failure reports, (we were told something like less than 1 percent? Can't remember exactly, but it was a tiny reported amount of printhead failure.) I believe we have replaced like 8-10 heads on ours since we bought it?
All that said, Canon as a company have been pretty good to us, and all in all they seem to want to take care of us, just not sure their equipment delivers what they say it would. They actually agreed to completely replace our first machine, but the new one hasn't faired much better. We have had techs out here so many times, we actually became trained to perform a lot of the service tasks ourselves, just to avoid downtimes.
I could go into more specifics and problems, but the real reason I post this, is I am questioning - is this normal? Is it just expected in our industry that these large format, flatbed printers (regardless of brand) will on average be down anywhere from 8-15 times a year if you run them as hard as we do? To clarify, we do ALL the maintenance, cleaning, etc that is required, usually even more so. All our machines are on service contracts as well. OR...is this specific machine truly just not a performer?
Can anyone else chime in? I would love to hear success stories of people running the heck out of their equipment, without any major downtimes - regardless of specific printers brand/models. Anyone?