Canon Colorado

[MarkSnelling]

Can anyone tell me the ink cost as well as extended warranty costs?

Ink costs $170/liter but the gas mileage is much different. Nearly all of my customer claim to be running around $.08/ft2 but I like to sell it based on $.10/ft2 to be safe. If you profile things in Onyx carefully, you can get your ink costs down to around $.05ft2. They have several service contracts, but if you deal with a local distributor I'd tell it is isn't worth it. I've only sold 2 service contracts out of the dozens of units we've put in the field. They offer two packages - service only and "Pro Care". The difference, other than cost, is the Pro Care Plus offers "one print head per year" for three years....it isn't cumulative so you'd get 3 heads anytime during the three years. The difference is $694/month vs. $439/month.

 

[MarkSnelling]

We have two M5's and are only able to run each at High Quality or Premium to get acceptable prints with no banding which makes the expected output speeds grind to a halt. We could have gotten four Epson

We have two M5's and can only get non-banded prints at High Quality and Premium modes which severely impacts speed. Only after purchasing were we told it isn't really meant to run calendared material. For the price we could have gotten four Epson S60's and been cranking output speed. If others out there have M5 model and are getting great prints out of Production or even Quality mode, we would love to know how you are doing it. And yes, we know what we are doing in production.

Anyone selling the unit should make it clear that on calendared vinyl you should expect to live in the 400sf/hr range as you'll see some issues at the 600+sf/hr speeds. on banner and paper you realize those faster speeds, though. Cast can be trickier and some of my customers run their cast films in the Specialty Mode.

 

[P Wagner]

Anyone selling the unit should make it clear that on calendared vinyl you should expect to live in the 400sf/hr range as you'll see some issues at the 600+sf/hr speeds. on banner and paper you realize those faster speeds, though. Cast can be trickier and some of my customers run their cast films in the Specialty Mode.

What is the print speed of the Specialty Mode?

 

[victor bogdanov]

What is the print speed of the Specialty Mode?

220 sq ft/hr , pretty much same as a 60600 at comparable print quality

 

[P Wagner]

220 sq ft/hr , pretty much same as a 60600 at comparable print quality

Thank you

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

Wow we must be an anomoly... we have no banding in production mode and run wraps in high quality. Our colors are solid but we have learned to not use the onyx color engine but have switched to XRite and only use Onyx for print management.

We just ran a job with color matching a Seiko with horrible color management and even though we are a 4 color machine, we are nearly 100% nailing their colors.

Wraps are great on both our 1650 and M5W, prints well and installs well.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

Anyone selling the unit should make it clear that on calendared vinyl you should expect to live in the 400sf/hr range as you'll see some issues at the 600+sf/hr speeds. on banner and paper you realize those faster speeds, though. Cast can be trickier and some of my customers run their cast films in the Specialty Mode.

What issues are your customers seeing at production with Calendared film? We run calendared in production mode.

 

[MarkSnelling]

What issues are your customers seeing at production with Calendared film? We run calendared in production mode.

stepping issues....it can clearly be overcome with solid operating skills...but I usually tell people that they'll be happy in the High Quality/Quality modes and they might be able to product in Production Mode...never want to oversell it.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

stepping issues....it can clearly be overcome with solid operating skills...but I usually tell people that they'll be happy in the High Quality/Quality modes and they might be able to product in Production Mode...never want to oversell it.

Understanding step correction and proper alignment makes all the difference

 

[Notarealsignguy]

I'd have a hard time buying any machine that locked me into using their service for any repairs.

 

[victor bogdanov]

Understanding step correction and proper alignment makes all the difference

I would run into an issue I would describe as ink starvation in production mode and matte speed on darker areas (when my heads didn't have any missing nozzles). Every 5 or so feet there would be half a pass that was just slightly lighter than the rest like not enough ink is getting to the heads. Too many ruined prints in these modes for me to risk running them. Canons only suggestion was to go slower. But now with missing nozzles those modes are out of the question due to missing nozzles

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

I'd have a hard time buying any machine that locked me into using their service for any repairs.

We don't, we use our vendors instead

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

I would run into an issue I would describe as ink starvation in production mode and matte speed on darker areas (when my heads didn't have any missing nozzles). Every 5 or so feet there would be half a pass that was just slightly lighter than the rest like not enough ink is getting to the heads. Too many ruined prints in these modes for me to risk running them. Canons only suggestion was to go slower. But now with missing nozzles those modes are out of the question due to missing nozzles

Wow, we haven't seen that at all. We run max speed for a few of our prints too that get wrapped on car temporarily. Interesting though, we are on Colorado 3 now with 2 active, the other one we traded in for the M series.

 

[MarkSnelling]

I would run into an issue I would describe as ink starvation in production mode and matte speed on darker areas (when my heads didn't have any missing nozzles). Every 5 or so feet there would be half a pass that was just slightly lighter than the rest like not enough ink is getting to the heads. Too many ruined prints in these modes for me to risk running them. Canons only suggestion was to go slower. But now with missing nozzles those modes are out of the question due to missing nozzles

Victor - when was the last time you changed the ink tubes on your Colorado? We are almost to the point of strongly suggesting this be done about every 9 months to a year for our customers. They seem to crimp over time like a squished straw which then doesn't get the ink to the head as it requires....an error code usually pops up and one of the first suggestions is to change the head...when it is just some flimsy tubes. If you haven't done it, have a tech out to do it and watch so you can do it yourself.

 

[victor bogdanov]

Victor - when was the last time you changed the ink tubes on your Colorado? We are almost to the point of strongly suggesting this be done about every 9 months to a year for our customers. They seem to crimp over time like a squished straw which then doesn't get the ink to the head as it requires....an error code usually pops up and one of the first suggestions is to change the head...when it is just some flimsy tubes. If you haven't done it, have a tech out to do it and watch so you can do it yourself.

Ok I'll ask Canon about it. Ink lines have never been changed

 

[Notarealsignguy]

We don't, we use our vendors instead

AFAIK you can't with certain products but I was talking more about in house repairs. If a printhead or something needs replaced, I want to do that myself after hours or on a weekend to avoid workflow interruption. You generally keep machinery highly utilized so having to wait a week or more for a tech to show up can really screw you up. Our large compressor went down at the end of December which was under warranty and only the dealer could work on it. We ran a backup which was much slower for the 3-4 weeks but it put us so far behind that we are just now completing jobs that came in here during January. All from this. It went down 3 other times and we repaired it, just ate the cost of the parts but this time it needed the computer to read the ECM faults and run diagnostic testing. If we had access to that, we would have had it up in a day.