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Equipment Redundancy - Bad idea to rely on one printer?

cmoist

New Member
That's frustrating. Where I work during the day (not in the sign industry), we offer service contracts and we ensure everything is sent the first time. It's cheaper to send a tech once with extra parts that can be returned than it is to send the tech multiple times. Plus, those who are paying a premium for a service contract always demand (and rightfully so) that fixes are immediate. I think I would have some candid conversations about what exactly you're paying for with your service contract.
 

White Haus

Not a Newbie
The pattern repeats, tech shows up 4pm, clock out at 5:30. Wrong parts, not enough time to order new parts to ship same day......

That's brutal, sorry to hear they're giving you such bad service. I take it your dealing directly with Canon?

Have you tried to bring it up the chain of command? You're taking this much better than how I'd take it if I was paying for a service contract and being left down for over a week.
 

victor bogdanov

Active Member
That's brutal, sorry to hear they're giving you such bad service. I take it your dealing directly with Canon?

Have you tried to bring it up the chain of command? You're taking this much better than how I'd take it if I was paying for a service contract and being left down for over a week.
It is up the chain now, only thanks to signs101 and Mark Snelling - Hasco Graphics for seeing this thread and making some calls.

Repairs in progress

 

Notarealsignguy

Arial - it's almost helvetica
Unfortunately as machines age, the repairs become longer, more expensive and harder to diagnose. I wont hang onto anything for an extended period of time that I can't fix myself.
 

netsol

Active Member
A new epson costs the same as Colorado service contract for 1 year, im supposed to have comfort that I'm covered with the service contract but not looking good right now.
we have an Oce' (same parent company/division of canon) and same attitude that they are doing you a favor.
nice equipment but you suffer during a breakdown
 

parrott

New Member
Just signed my service contract on our 1650 yesterday. Not getting a warm and fuzzy feeling. Time will tell.

When they installed our Colorado we experienced the same issues with techs showing up at 4 and would have to leave by 530. Took them a better part of two weeks to finally get the machine working properly. Not the techs fault, just not enough techs in our area.

Love our machine and have experienced little to no issues but it is only 1 year old. Hope they get you back to printing soon!
 

MikePro

New Member
worst case, you should always have a local resource to unload your prints onto. plenty of printshops would gladly accept your $$$ to run a roll at the end of a day and let you finish processing.
 

victor bogdanov

Active Member
Today Canon put in a great effort after the escalations, 3 techs looking at the machine, I feel like they did all they could. Unfortunately did not make any progress on the repairs.

I doubt this will be resolved this week but I am getting some prints out by using a friend's printer
 
I feel like this must be just dependent on where you are... Where I am, my Canon/Oce techs are MONEY. Always there quick and keep ol bessy running (arizona 450gt). My grimco service? Well they send someone and change everything out, don't fix it and I never hear from them again.
 

ikarasu

Active Member
Service contracts are great in theory... But when its a problem thats more than just swap this part quickly, I find the carrier always falls short.

I just had my graphtec in for repair for 4 months because they couldnt figure it out - They worked on it maybe an hour a week... Because why repair something you cant bill the customer for, when you could be doing other repairs and making money?


Our 700W was just down for 3 weeks - Not Down / Down... But the little heater compartment they decided to motorize wouldn't open or close - We could still print, but we had to maually open it and tape it up / mostly closed so it'd trap the heat. Took 6 visits... all motors / PCBS's replaced 3 times a long with a ton of other stuff done to it, Luckly we were still operational. But the trend is to just Shotgun replace parts - order what HP tells them to, spend 20 mins replacing it.... call HP back and re-order the exact same thing because they could have sent a faulty one... Replace everything... call HP And replace another part....call HP and do it again... etc. Most of the time they dont want to spend hours diagnosing anymore, they just want to pump new parts into the machine until it works.

Kind of nice since you get a bunch of new parts for free, but also kind of shitty if you're out of service when they do it. I lost so much business when my graphtec was down - and the only reason it got fixed was because I put in an order for a Summa, and graphtec finally got the hint and they spent a few days on it.
 

Behrmon

Pr. Bear-Mon
if I go 2 printers it'll be 2 epsons, 0 Colorados

Another business day over, 0 updates. Long wait times on the phone for someone to pick up only to be hung up on by the service department, unbelievable
Have to say that this has not been our experience, so far if we needed a tech they've been out pretty quickly whether for the Arizonas or the Colorado, maybe being in the North East s a plus for that in our case? As to calling customer support, I usually just opt for a call back and have gotten them within an hour. Our second Colorado will drop Monday. Hopefully this will be our continued experience.
 

victor bogdanov

Active Member
Have to say that this has not been our experience, so far if we needed a tech they've been out pretty quickly whether for the Arizonas or the Colorado, maybe being in the North East s a plus for that in our case? As to calling customer support, I usually just opt for a call back and have gotten them within an hour. Our second Colorado will drop Monday. Hopefully this will be our continued experience.
My service experiences have been great too up until this point.

Canon is getting close to fixing the printer, I'm hoping Monday it will be printing again. This might end up being a very simple/common problem that happens in any brand printer

One option I'll explore is getting the self service plan for the Colorado, I remember reading there is a way to get trained to fix your own machine.
 

Pauly

Printrade.com.au
I dont think it's self service, but it's parts only?

That's not A bad idea if that's the case. The manuals have all the info on how to replace and diagnose everything.
 
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