Colorspan 5460 ink not refilling

[Slof]

Hi,
Since last thursday our ColorSpan 5460 is unable to fill it's on-head ink resevoir. Half way a job it cancelled printing telling me that it was unable to fill the black ink reservoir on the printhead. I manually refilled the heads black & cyan with ink but it got stuck on 19% of the refilling process and retried and retried and retried until the heads were filled again so i could continue my job (had to restart all over again with printing...bummer). An engineer made a visit and could not find any problems so he left us again. Yesterday the problem occured again but this time with the magenta ink-reservoir. Pump values according to Colorspan are in order, nothing wrong there. Anybody out here had the same problem before and how did they fix it? Any input would be handy. I've just called the engineer again so i hope he will arrive soon but if anybody had the same problem before it would be nice to know how it was fixed.

The ink-containers are nearly full so that's not the problem. Perhaps some air in the valves or pumps?

Greetz,
Olaf.

 

[Steve Prince]

You probably have this fixed by now, but we had a similar problem with our 5445. The yellow showed just under half, but ran out. Then it took Hours to refill. Then, with plenty of ink we kept getting an error message that it's out of yellow ink about every 3rd job. They replaced the pump (which is located just inside the cabinet by the ink box, and the thermister. Seemed to fix it.

When we got the error message we were able to purge in able to make it through the next couple of jobs.

 

[ksc]

Do not !purchase a hp / colors pan flatbed uv printer i have had mine for about 11 months with only 60 hrs on it The printer has had over 60 in shop man hours on it (warranty repair time) and is not fixed yet....the printer was purchased 1/07 im having my lawyer return it for me.......

 

[ksc]

Finally my lawyer got a response today from hp colorspan they want to give me a new printer in place of the existing 98uvx.....does any one know if hp makes a 8' (non colorspan) hybrid type uv flat bed printer that functions correctly.....????? ideas any one.....???????

 

[Blizare]

Get a Cheque

 

[Timer]

Help / HP Colorspan 5465

Hi "ksc",

We have found your comment you have written on the forum of sign101, that's why I ask for your help.
My name is Soma Timer from Hungary/Europe and I have got a Colorspan 5465 since 12/2007. The printer has got several problems, it doesn't work at all now. The heads went wrong, the automatic head clearing system doesn't work, the quality of the printing got worse and now it's not useful.
The distributor we have bought the printer don't help for us at all, we also ask for help to a lawyer.
That's why I'm asking your help, how could you persuade HP to give your money back? They want to persuade me buying a Colorspan 9840 for a lot of money, but after this all, I haven't got confidence at all.....

What about your case? Did it end reassuringly?

It would be very nice if you could help me....

Thanks is advance with best wishes,
Soma Timer
from Hungary

 

[JefHeller]

I feel your pain!

We've had a 5460 since December of 2007. For the first five months it worked great. That's not to say we were not oversold. We were told that the printer could print on plywood, laminate, plexi, aluminum, etc. Essentially anything less than an inch thick. We found out right away that this was not the case. The grit rollers are not strong enough to pull anything as heavy as a sheet of plywood, and the vacuum simply won't hold laminate or sheet aluminum flat enough to consistently print without head strikes. You can print to plexi, but the ink easily scratches and flakes off. Since our bread and butter work is sintra prints and rollable vinyl, we forged ahead knowing that we were saving money in labor and materials by no longer have to mount our prints in the traditional sense.

Then, after about five months, we started to have many mechanical problems with the printer. Vacuum pressure errors, temperature problems, dead LED screen, spitting magenta pools of ink up on the print. We had the tech guys in and out of here all summer. Very frustrating!! They changed essentially every part out on the machine except the castors. Finally one of the techs found a busted thermister. All of the themisters had been changed out but I guess they broke one of the new ones putting it in. Since then, the machine has been more reliable.

We did get an error this week telling us that the light cyan head was out of ink even though there was plenty of ink in the carton. It kept canceling the print at 20-30% complete. The print we were making was a solid blue panel (using alot of light cyan). So our print operator tried putting a .5 sec. delay on the carriage between passes. Guess what - IT WORKED! I guess the delay allowed enough time for the pump to keep up with the demand for light cyan. Big pat on the back for my guy on that one!

I wish I could say that I'm really happy with the machine. For a shop like ours it's a sizable investment. It does what we do pretty well, but it has not allowed to expand into new materials like we thought it would. I guess if someone asked me for a recommendation, I would tell them to look at something else.

 

[Blueman]

Hi JefHeller, Your story echoes mine, I bought the colourspan 5460 in September 2008 - After the HP certification had been done. It was oversold to me as well, glass was also mentioned. We have had problems with media feed, skewing of anything heavier than fluted plastic or 3mm foam and forget plexi or acrylic the ceramic rollers are not up to the task. We went through a period of it not finding the leading edge.

Some of the things that have been replaced are the camera (twice), the lamps and cooling fans, the carriage rollers, the carriage belt pulley, all the heads and various bits that I can't remember for the moment. One engineer told me that the lamp cooling fans used to be replaced on a regular basis but the newer ones were more reliable- guess what --- I had the old type in mine.

We, like you, were looking to get into the large format digital market and yes, to us this was a substantial investment but have been disappointed in the reliability of the colourspan 5460. one thing good thing I will say is that for what it can do (and when it's working) the quality is great,