NEVER BUY A ROLAND!

[netsol]

One person posted this reply: He never mentioned his model number. Only 5+ years. So I am assuming his product reached his end of life.

Now that is what I call built in obsolesce.

Many manufacturers do this today with many products, from appliances to car parts to wide format printers.
Years ago it was common for appliances to last for between 15 and 25 years, and then manufacturers realized they could sell more appliances if they only lasted between 8 and 12 years.

When I was looking for a new washer and drier I asked the sale person who I knew at Home Depot how long he thought these appliances might last, he told me if I get between 7 to 10 years I should consider myself lucky !!

When my cell phone started acting up, I figured it needed a New battery, only to find out you can no longer change batteries, and instead they want you to purchase a new phone.
Maybe they should apply this type of thinking to cars and when your battery dies, just tell you it's time to purchase a New car.

My Roland SP-300V works like a charm, and it was new in 2004,

Just my opinion. Jim

jim, of course you can change your cell phone battery, just not by yourself

i manage a fleet of cell phones, android tablets & ipads/iphones for a large client
you an go to a cell phone repair kiosk at the mall or (better) a national franchise like mobility & beyond and have the battery changed while you wait ( about 30 minutes)

i just had battery changes last week for a out $45 dollars (some are of course more)

you can also go to bulbs & batteries .com another national franchise

 

[netsol]

New washers aren't allowed to use as much water or electricity than they did 20 years ago. And they found half the parts in the old appliances cause cancer in California. So they all needed to be re-engineered. In the future you won't be allowed to purchase a new car, because you'll own nothing and be happy.

New washers aren't allowed to use as much water or electricity than they did 20 years ago. And they found half the parts in the old appliances cause cancer in California. So they all needed to be re-engineered. In the future you won't be allowed to purchase a new car, because you'll own nothing and be happy.

weyandsign,
perhaps the lesson of california is:
don't let fanatics and mental patients set public policy

they reject the concept of "acceptable level" & instead expect levels to be completey undetectable

 

[jason91]

I remember when the Roland service manager told me that my SP-300V was a legacy printer and that they would no longer service it or sell me the parts to serve it my self.

I told him that's find because there are many other companies, some in China reproducing parts for my printer, and they are more than happy to take my money and send me the parts.
And for those wondering about using parts from China, my experience is they work just fine.

Roland really wants every user to upgrade to their latest printer, so they make it difficult to receive service. Just remember with the newer printers, you are locked out of service mode.

Jim

Where do you get your parts from?

 

[dreko]

Oh geez... Our printer has started doing the exact same thing. It runs a cleaning cycle during a print. We've never run anything but Roland OEM inks. I've purchased inks from our initial dealer, other local dealers and online dealers. All official Roland products and dealers. Running a LEC2-300... I hope what the OP wrote is incorrect... 'once your printer thinks it has 3rd party inks, it's locked into this punishment cycle'

 

[Jim Hill]

Where do you get your parts from?

trI

Where do you get your parts from?

I have tried a few different companies in China, and I also use some parts from sources that advertise here on the Roland posts.

Here are a few:

solventinkjet.com

inkjetperformance.com

solventinkonline.com

Hope that helps you out.

Jim

 

[dreko]

So just a *possible update to this thread
I'm running a LEC2-300 and it's doing a cleaning cycle during every print. My original owner manuals showed there was a menu option:

The manual doesn't state whether that 30 min auto cleaning time can be adjusted... it doesn't say at what time/point my printer has hit some internal Odometer on printing, then kicked this 'feature' on.... to start auto cleaning every 30 mins (default)
I go into the menus, and THANKS ROLAND. This section in the onboard printer menu is now GONE. Yep, at some point during firmware updates... it looks as though Roland has eliminated this from the LEC2-300, and I suspect this issue will happen with the LEC2-330, LEC2-640, LEC2-330S-F200, LEC2-640S-F200, LEC2-640S-F300, LEC2-640S-F400. They all are built on the
LEC2-platform release pre pandemic

My dealer/tech support has been waiting for answer from Roland... and I now play the waiting game. Burn the clock and days. I could almost live with this, however, when it starts the auto clean cycle during a print... it leaves a visual line break where it stopped... as well as slightly raised ink where it stopped.
I'm also not printing on an inexpensive substrate. I'm printing on metal. So, you lose ink on auto cleanings, you lose more production time becuase of the auto cleanings/loss, and finally you lose material expenses.

Sorry to vent, extremely frustrated with this situation and mad as hell. As a first time Roland owner, I could have lived with the slow print speeds.. I could have lived with the support structure Roland dictates (go through dealer, then wait from Roland)... but I can't help but feeling I'm getting nickeled and dimed from this company. I had considered
purchasing a newer Roland/Upgrade... but I'm waiting to see how Roland handles this..
BTW, my printer is under warranty still.

I get that Roland has very strict policies in place because I run their white inks... but putting this unneccessary auto cleaning cycle in... so it can protect the inkjet head from clogs... well I guess it's turned out to be quite the expensive printer to own and operate.


Any thoughts or sympathetic support from other Roland owners/users? lol

​

 

[mr-blue]

Nerve your salesperson every day. Say you can't produce and will keep calling until a reasonable solution comes.

 

[SGC]

weyandsign,
perhaps the lesson of california is:
don't let fanatics and mental patients set public policy

they reject the concept of "acceptable level" & instead expect levels to be completey undetectable

This sounds like a vote for zero accountability more than you maybe thought it did.

California requires too much. Everyone else requires too little. There needs to be a middle ground, which today we really don’t have. The industrial revolution and our lovely (lack of) laws in relation to chemically altered food changed the statistics of various sickness and cancers drastically.

California safety laws, though in most cases too firm, have helped more than harmed (the health) the consumer, since the rest of the country doesn’t give a rats butt what chemical leaching does to you.

Off my high horse I go to breath my UV printers

 

[SGC]

Oh geez... Our printer has started doing the exact same thing. It runs a cleaning cycle during a print. We've never run anything but Roland OEM inks. I've purchased inks from our initial dealer, other local dealers and online dealers. All official Roland products and dealers. Running a LEC2-300... I hope what the OP wrote is incorrect... 'once your printer thinks it has 3rd party inks, it's locked into this punishment cycle'

Which goes away once you cycle a functional chip back into the printer. Call your dealer, if you’ve never putt third party in, this shouldn’t happen. This is a current generation printer, demand the love.

 

[SGC]

So just a *possible update to this thread
I'm running a LEC2-300 and it's doing a cleaning cycle during every print. My original owner manuals showed there was a menu option:
View attachment 160831

The manual doesn't state whether that 30 min auto cleaning time can be adjusted... it doesn't say at what time/point my printer has hit some internal Odometer on printing, then kicked this 'feature' on.... to start auto cleaning every 30 mins (default)
I go into the menus, and THANKS ROLAND. This section in the onboard printer menu is now GONE. Yep, at some point during firmware updates... it looks as though Roland has eliminated this from the LEC2-300, and I suspect this issue will happen with the LEC2-330, LEC2-640, LEC2-330S-F200, LEC2-640S-F200, LEC2-640S-F300, LEC2-640S-F400. They all are built on the
LEC2-platform release pre pandemic

My dealer/tech support has been waiting for answer from Roland... and I now play the waiting game. Burn the clock and days. I could almost live with this, however, when it starts the auto clean cycle during a print... it leaves a visual line break where it stopped... as well as slightly raised ink where it stopped.
I'm also not printing on an inexpensive substrate. I'm printing on metal. So, you lose ink on auto cleanings, you lose more production time becuase of the auto cleanings/loss, and finally you lose material expenses.

Sorry to vent, extremely frustrated with this situation and mad as hell. As a first time Roland owner, I could have lived with the slow print speeds.. I could have lived with the support structure Roland dictates (go through dealer, then wait from Roland)... but I can't help but feeling I'm getting nickeled and dimed from this company. I had considered
purchasing a newer Roland/Upgrade... but I'm waiting to see how Roland handles this..
BTW, my printer is under warranty still.

I get that Roland has very strict policies in place because I run their white inks... but putting this unneccessary auto cleaning cycle in... so it can protect the inkjet head from clogs... well I guess it's turned out to be quite the expensive printer to own and operate.


Any thoughts or sympathetic support from other Roland owners/users? lol

​

Who’s your dealer? If this left regular mode, it has to have been moved to service mode, right? It has to be able to be turned off. The hard line from cleanings is real, happens on my LEC300A, so that’s absolutely unacceptable. Whoever sold and installed that printer should be called and bothered daily until it’s fixed.

 

[mr-blue]

I ask my Roland salesman what it will cost if a technician call-out is needed. He recommended that I sign a maintenance contract with Roland. The adventurous prices for this you can see in the attachment. Just for the maintenance package, which means nothing more than that a technician comes twice and checks whether everything is in order, you should pay 1338€. They also emphasize that you can ask the technician questions - how generous!

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Let's face it, ownership of these products, and over various other industries, has taken a nose dive. It used to be, we could service our own stuff. Shoot a lot of products used to have schematics taped to the inside of whatever shell with part numbers to help one do it (a lot of those businesses are still around, so that info being out there didn't hurt their ability to still make money or lose their IP like they like to mention nowadays).

This is not a function of whatever change in supposedly safer machine production methods (although it comes at the price of less useful machine life which means more trash in landfills or elsewhere, bang up "sustainability" thought process there). Can still have a machine produced by those "modern" methods and still be serviceable. Most of this is purely slight of hand. Regardless if there is supposedly stricter laws.

There really isn't a way around this, especially if going with more mainstream products as it is now. Have the issue with one, will have it with others. Have to go with an OEM that doesn't do that (and there are tradeoffs with doing that, so have to balance both of those) and there aren't many or maybe not any at all, I haven't looked at this particular segment for 11 yrs now.

Now there was one other thing mentioned, usually parts available through OEM between 8-10 yrs or so. What they also prevent is a market to develop after that 10 yr (or so) that the OEM stopped wanting to deal with them, they usually make it much, much harder for a 3rd party to come in and fulfill that need that the OEM doesn't care to fulfill anymore and I consider that more of an issue. If they allowed a 3rd party to take up the slack that would be one thing, but they don't, instead they blither on about their IP or some other nonsense. Now after so long, it costs more to repair compared to get another one, but with more and more non self-repair products, those older less computerized products command a much, much higher price.

 

[Jim Hill]

My Roland SP-300V works just fine.

I have been servicing my printer myself for years and to be honest with you, I would rather have the older model Roland printer that I can put in service mode if I need to.

When I purchased this printer back in 2010 I had no idea how to even use but over the years I learned, and then I started getting interested in learning how to change heads and just about every other part because I never liked having to depend on service techs and the costs associated with getting it.

The parts I need from time to time are still available just not through Roland.

At the end of this month I am closing my business after 22 years, and now I will sell my Roland printer which has served me well for many years.

Jim

 

[SGC]

My Roland SP-300V works just fine.

I have been servicing my printer myself for years and to be honest with you, I would rather have the older model Roland printer that I can put in service mode if I need to.

When I purchased this printer back in 2010 I had no idea how to even use but over the years I learned, and then I started getting interested in learning how to change heads and just about every other part because I never liked having to depend on service techs and the costs associated with getting it.

The parts I need from time to time are still available just not through Roland.

At the end of this month I am closing my business after 22 years, and now I will sell my Roland printer which has served me well for many years.

Jim

Same. I’ve had my LEC300A since 2017 and I’ve done everything myself outside of the first couple tech visits. Things a junker, but it’s my junker. I’ll buy it’s big brother when it croaks.

 

[dreko]

Who’s your dealer? If this left regular mode, it has to have been moved to service mode, right? It has to be able to be turned off. The hard line from cleanings is real, happens on my LEC300A, so that’s absolutely unacceptable. Whoever sold and installed that printer should be called and bothered daily until it’s fixed.

My dealer is Central Paper. However, they are not willing to travel to my location as they've now deemed it too far and unacceptably out of their range. So, I'm currently trying to establish a new relationship with a local dealer. Still waiting on getting this taken care of , and a service tech on site. ... it's been quite a while.... that I've been dealing with this headache.

 

[dreko]

My Roland SP-300V works just fine.

I have been servicing my printer myself for years and to be honest with you, I would rather have the older model Roland printer that I can put in service mode if I need to.

When I purchased this printer back in 2010 I had no idea how to even use but over the years I learned, and then I started getting interested in learning how to change heads and just about every other part because I never liked having to depend on service techs and the costs associated with getting it.

The parts I need from time to time are still available just not through Roland.

At the end of this month I am closing my business after 22 years, and now I will sell my Roland printer which has served me well for many years.

Jim

I wish the new Roland printer was as easy going for us, as it was for you. I don't think you realize how draconian these new printers are, compared to the SP-300V
I suspect in my case, because I'm running WHITE ink, corporate policy is to make the owner and printer... clean clean clean all the time. (as well as consume ink and consumables during the process)

 

[Jim Hill]

I wish the new Roland printer was as easy going for us, as it was for you. I don't think you realize how draconian these new printers are, compared to the SP-300V
I suspect in my case, because I'm running WHITE ink, corporate policy is to make the owner and printer... clean clean clean all the time. (as well as consume ink and consumables during the process)

The Roland SP-300V in my opinion was one of the Best Printers Roland ever made.

It is not hard to work on and replace parts on.

Jim

 

[McDonald Signs]

I've been satisfied with my Roland SC-540. It;'s a 2004 model and I still print on it 5 days a week. It has had it's issues and has had to have something fixed on it every few years but I figure it's that way it goes on about any printer you buy.
Try contacting www.grafxnetwork.com in Georgia about your issue, they have been a big help to me on fixing my printer over the years. And on another note Roland tech support was not good for me on my 2004 model, tech support
pretty much told me I was on my own with it after about 1 year or so..... Had to find other places to get tech support on it.