Buying a printer - considering Roland VS-540i

[NateF]

I own a print shop and I'm looking to expand our in-house capabilities. Lately I've been farming out a ton of wide format stuff and I know I'd benefit from adding wide format. Add in the fact that I'm losing some jobs because of customers who don't like the idea of my not doing the work in-house, and I'm seriously looking at a wide format setup. We do mostly banners and laminated signs, but also end up doing window perf, vehicle lettering, wall murals, and even vehicle wraps (we design, outsource the printing, and hire an installer). I'm thinking that I should be able to bring 80% of that work in-house with the right equipment.

From what I've researched, the Roland VS-540i seems like a good fit. Everyone I talk to tells me that their Roland is bulletproof. Just have a few questions that I'm looking for some feedback on:

I'm thinking that I would probably go with the double CMYK setup. I don't see a big market for white and especially metallic. The light cyan, magenta, and black sound like a neat option, but not at the expense of ultimately slowing down the output of the machine. And I don't know if the average customer would notice the difference (and I especially don't know if they'd be wiling to pay for it.

The print-and-cut seems like an attractive option since we're limited on shop space. I can still fit probably a 5 x 10 work table, and I'd prefer not to give up any of that space to cutter at this point if I can help it.

I see that the Roland printer comes with VersaWorks. Are there any issues or shortcomings there that I should be aware of? I know I've read that it can have a hard time with transparencies. Am I going to be wishing at some point for a better RIP or is versaworks adequate? We use mostly Photoshop and Illustrator for design (though we still end up printing Publisher files, Word documents, and even powerpoint files that the customers bring us...Don't look at me like that - I told you it was gonna look like crap lol!).

 

[SignMeUpGraphics]

We've been running a VS-540 for 2.5 years without a single problem.

Versaworks handles transparency fine if you follow Roland's documentation properly:

[video=youtube;CvoLWXfUFNk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvoLWXfUFNk[/video]

Or you can just take the lazy option of exporting to full resolution TIFF from Illustrator and just RIP and print that.
(Saved my butt a couple of times with client supplied artwork that was too hard to convert quickly into the right layer order).

You really can't go wrong with a Roland setup. They are excellent machines.

 

[NateF]

Signmeup - thanks for the video link about dealing with transparencies. I've run into similar issues in the past with other vendors that use Flexi, and I know I read that some people had a similar problem with VersaWorks. Glad to know that there is a solution/workaround. I knew I could print from a TIFF but that can defeat a lot of the purpose for using vector data in the first place. Good to know as an option, but not something I'd want to rely on as a solution.

 

[k_graham]

A word of caution;
I sent this xerox file http://dc.communityprinters.com/colors/Complex Design.pdf to vendors of wide format. Mimaki, HP, and Roland. 2 out of 3 printed it correctly. The 3rd printed it wrong with white frames around the pictures which differs from the monitor display, technically it should be dropped as a pdf into the RIP as a work around we used for years is to "Print as Image" from Adobe Acrobat. This can be much slower ripping than printing as vector however as well any color in a multipage file makes the entire multipage file color. To print correctly with simply dropping it in requires a Adobe APPE RIP or one that functions as such.

My take is that you never know what your customer is going to provide you so am only purchasing color RIP devices that are Adobe APPE to deal with transparencies and lens effects or function as such. You decide how much you want to risk an error like this getting through.

Ken