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New DX5 printheads cause a line at 60cm

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xxtoni

New Member
This is some really fascinating stuff.

I've just talked to some guys from WIT Color which is a Chinese printer maker that also does (did) DX5 models. They told me that this is in fact a problem on the new DX5 heads but that they have supposedly found a way to get around it and get it to print full width, even with the new head. But he did point out that they still use the old DX5 heads that don't have this problem. He also told me that doing the "decoding" as he calls it affects the resolution so who knows what they do. HE also says that they are still using the older DX5 heads, presumably because of the resolution issues with their solution.

This is an industry issue as if they're doing this with DX5 heads they're bound to start doing it with DX7 ones as well, if they aren't already. The Epson print heads still have the best resolution, speed, stability and price. I'm personally considering a spectra polaris printer right now but that has more to do with the fact that I need strong solvent for outdoor durability. If the Epson heads could run on stronger solvent I'd favor them over the spectras. One beef I have with the spectras is that they're relatively expensive at $2k per head but they run strong solvent so they're the best out there right now.

Ricoh isn't even worth mentioning at like $4k, price could eventually come down but it's gonna take a while considering how high it is right now.

This is really troubling for the industry as a whole, especially for the up and coming Chinese market which is starting to produce some very decent printers. If this happened in Europe or the U.S. you bet your *** that there would be investigations there and all sorts of inquires...

Right now, unless Epson has a change of heart, and there seems to be no indication that they will based on the last few years, it's in Spectra, Seiko and Ricoh that we have to put our trust.

Most people here may think..."well why is it important if they block access to these third party Chinese manufacturers". It's price. In high tech, more so than probably any other industry, prices go down every year but to me it seems as if in the last few years the print head prices have just stood still.
 
artbot

artbot

New Member
epson is a horrible company. for years we've been fed the myth of OEM mimaki, roland, etc. all just the same head they were putting in a desktop printer. i got a dx4 head unit (three heads bound together) and each head had, stacked perfectly on top of each other, an epson head rank, then a roland, then a mimaki. worst yet, is when i disassembled the head unit, i noticed that each dx4 had a cute little rubber seal/umbrella over the "hole" in the middle of the pcb. (this is the hole that if a single drop of ink enters, your head will fry instantly). so the epson provides the "OEM" with an unprotected dx4 and epson dx4 have the seal. this is a conscious decision made by a company that is already lying about how much more "hardy" and "solvent resistant" the solvent resistant head is when in fact, it is the same head save a different head manifold and minus some protective measures. epson for the larger printer manufacturers had them pay them an "ink" royalty for using their heads. well, chinese builders don't pay an ink royalty. thing is chinese builders go through so many more dx5's then roland, mimaki, and mutoh, there's no comparison. so they skirt the issue. but now all of china is faced with this firmware issue that does nothing but cause one guy to pay $150 for a head and the next guy pay $1100 for that same head (which probably cost less to build because it doesn't have this altered board). i hope spectra or some other company decides to build a "spectra" light solvent head or something. there's no doubt that these industrial heads are bullet proof and run 24/7. but surely with enough volume there's interest in coming up with a multi channel head.
 
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xxtoni

New Member
Well I have a lot of thoughts about the situation.

As easy as it would be to blame Epson and foresee how they're a bloated enemy in a crumbling castle I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated than that, at least from my perspective.

I'm not sure that I have all the info but if I understood it correctly Epson sells it's heads to anyone that wants to buy them (with a MOQ). If I understand correctly getting the heads through the official channels isn't a problem, where Epson sells them for like $2k a pop. The problem is with print heads taken out of their desktop printers because they change the firmware, and now it seems even chips, to prevent them from being used in large format printers. Is my information correct so far ?

Because if that's the case Epson really can't be blamed for anything here. First of all the issue of "it's all the same heads, yet some costs 10x more than others" is problematic because of the desktop printer market in general, which I'm guessing most people get their cheap heads from. It is common knowledge that most companies in the desktop printer market use the razor blade model. You basically get the printer for very cheap and the ink costs more than the printer. So if that's also the case with Epson, they are selling the printer (including the head) at a loss and hoping to make their money on their ink. So you really can't blame them for limiting the use of those print heads in wide format printers.

What's important to understand is, even if it costs them $100 to make the heads they probably invested millions or tens of millions into the development of them over the years, obviously it can't be easy cause their heads are the best and heads at newcomers like RICOH cost $4k a pop. So scale of economy certainly exists there.

The problem here is one that is very common in enterprise vs consumer products. The PC perhaps being the perfect analogy. Computing power only started growing exponentially and becoming cheaper once the PC became a consume product even though computers were used by banks and the military and universities and so on. The reason for this is scale. When you are shipping 10 million computers instead of 50k per year of course competition is gonna spur up in the field like mushrooms after a rainy day, the competition then leads to more features, more power and lower prices.

The same applies for the desktop printer vs wide format printer market. The desktop printer industry has sales in tens of millions of units, heck maybe hundreds of millions per year. I'd be really surprised if a single wide format printer manufacture sells more than 100k of printers in year and that's a long shot. It's just such a radical difference in market size.

Another thing here is that you have to think about consumer vs enterprise pricing. This doesn't apply completely because most costumers of Epson, Roland, Mimaki, Mutoh and co. are probably small businesses so the prices have to be at least somewhat competitive but as someone coming from a high tech background I can tell you that when someone develops a Saas (software as a service) they might price it for $50 per month for the consumer and $500 or a $1000 for the enterprise market. The reason for this is that dealing with enterprise users can be difficult but also because they reason that the price doesn't really matter when you selling to big companies because that's just a rounding error for them. Doesn't apply completely but you can bet that when someone is selling to a business they have this "they will use this to make money" mind set in the head and that can affect price to a degree as well.

My last point, I promise is why everyone is giving Epson a stink about this. Epson is in a unique position here, they are the only print head manufacturer (that I know of) that does heads both for desktop and wide format printers, or more specifically that uses the same heads for both it's wide format and desktop printers. It's only natural that people want to exploit this, I too would if I could so no moral dilemmas from my end, but from a business perspective I can understand why they would want to limit people from using their desktop printer heads in wide format printers. I'm pretty sure that Epson has no problem selling you their print head for $2k but you are pissed about it (me too as I have a Roland printer that uses their DX6 head and paid over $2k for one recently) because you know that you could buy a $300-500 desktop printer that has the same head and you could take it apart and get it but you're limited by software from using it. I bet most people aren't saying that Spectra are ***holes cause their heads cost $2k. Sure we complain about it that it's too much but ultimately we accept that it costs that much.

The problem with price in our industry is simply volume. The market isn't big enough to attract more competition and the volume of heads going out isn't big enough to spark a price war that would bring the cost down. That's an inherit problem of most enterprise markets.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
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GrushinAnton

New Member
So, last news from me about the problem:
At first we decided that a position of line (60 or 80 cm) depend of resolution of printing.
Also 80 cm is 2*40 - this is two-way route of Epson A3 printhead . So, after 80 cm of route, printhead "thinking" that a new "cycle" is start . Our task is to give a command to printhead not to "clear her route"

We found an electrical scheme of DX5 and next week we'll try to read commands from it.

So, if anybody have any ideas about it -please write!

Sorry for my English.
 
artbot

artbot

New Member
@xxytoni well said. in the end, desktop dx5 will be decoded and we'll pay some genius $300 for a chip that goes somewhere on the data ribbon and it will all be over. if we can put a man on the moon, we can hack a dx5's logic whatever.
 
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GrushinAnton

New Member
:) Ok, I will sell a chip if I make it. 300 dollars is too much, because original printhead costs 1200 $ and "water based" costs 700$ Economy of 200 $ is not so much.
 
4R Graphics

4R Graphics

New Member
XXtoni,
Well said and Totally get it however 2 things to think about first is the fact that most of the DX5 heads I have seen forsale have gone up in price over the last few years.

The second and biggest id if Epson is basing there business on making money from the ink by selling the printers at a loss well thats probablly not a good business plan.

The fact is I can buy a new epson desktop printer for half what the china heads on ebay are running. Also if I have a epson printer that has a bad head I can get a new head installed by an epson dealer for $600 or so with parts and labor so I cant imagine that if they are selling the replacement heads for this price that there taking a loss which tells me there is no loss on a DX5 head at $500 so why rake us over the coals for 3 to 5 times that.

Besides as you stated they probably spent millions on R&D but they have sold boat loads of printers (iam sure they make some profit on the desktops) and could still turn a profit on heads to us and everyone else if they just sold them for a reasonable price OEM solvent (with manifold and rank numbers) straight from EPSON for $600-$1200 I would buy it from them all day long.

But the china heads are now $1300+ and OEM has always been insane at $2000+ (considering the head and where it comes from and is used)

Just my 2 cents
 
G

GrushinAnton

New Member
xxtoni said:
This is some really fascinating stuff.

I've just talked to some guys from WIT Color which is a Chinese printer maker that also does (did) DX5 models. They told me that this is in fact a problem on the new DX5 heads but that they have supposedly found a way to get around it and get it to print full width, even with the new head. But he did point out that they still use the old DX5 heads that don't have this problem. He also told me that doing the "decoding" as he calls it affects the resolution so who knows what they do. HE also says that they are still using the older DX5 heads, presumably because of the resolution issues with their solution.
Click to expand...


Xxtoni, I talked with Witcolor support about this problem. As I understand they didnt knew about this before I gave them this forum link.
So, could you tell me who said to you that they know the way to get around this problem?
 
X

xxtoni

New Member
4R Graphics said:
XXtoni,
Well said and Totally get it however 2 things to think about first is the fact that most of the DX5 heads I have seen forsale have gone up in price over the last few years.

The second and biggest id if Epson is basing there business on making money from the ink by selling the printers at a loss well thats probablly not a good business plan.

The fact is I can buy a new epson desktop printer for half what the china heads on ebay are running. Also if I have a epson printer that has a bad head I can get a new head installed by an epson dealer for $600 or so with parts and labor so I cant imagine that if they are selling the replacement heads for this price that there taking a loss which tells me there is no loss on a DX5 head at $500 so why rake us over the coals for 3 to 5 times that.

Besides as you stated they probably spent millions on R&D but they have sold boat loads of printers (iam sure they make some profit on the desktops) and could still turn a profit on heads to us and everyone else if they just sold them for a reasonable price OEM solvent (with manifold and rank numbers) straight from EPSON for $600-$1200 I would buy it from them all day long.

But the china heads are now $1300+ and OEM has always been insane at $2000+ (considering the head and where it comes from and is used)

Just my 2 cents
Click to expand...

I don't personally care if they lose money on the heads or not, if I could I would buy them cheaply under any circumstance.

Don't want to dig into it too deeply but:

1) I don't think they would have sold a lot more printers if the head was cheaper. Besides the head isn't something you replace every day, at worst you replace it once a year but still, it's a shock when unexpectedly it blocks up and you need to spend $2k all of a sudden.

2) At the end of the day the heads are their property and they can sell them how they want. What we're doing here is basically saying "Why are you making it so hard for us to steal from you", again I'd love to be able to get a head for $300-600 bucks but everyone prices their product as they see fit. This is a failure of the market more than anything. Epson has a virtual monopoly and there simply aren't enough companies out there making heads to force them to lower the price. At least they are constantly improving their heads, not sure how many of you guys remember but back in the day when Xerox had a monopoly market share they didn't really bother with making better products. That's often the case with companies that get monopoly market shares...because what's the point ? So you make a better copier, so what ? You already have a monopoly it's not gonna make the company any more successful.



GrushinAnton said:
Xxtoni, I talked with Witcolor support about this problem. As I understand they didnt knew about this before I gave them this forum link.
So, could you tell me who said to you that they know the way to get around this problem?
Click to expand...

I've talked to an engineer I know.
 
M

moris

New Member
GrushinAnton said:
:) Ok, I will sell a chip if I make it. 300 dollars is too much, because original printhead costs 1200 $ and "water based" costs 700$ Economy of 200 $ is not so much.
Click to expand...
hELLO sire,
can you give your adress in order to bay from you the chip that you did in order that new dx5print head works without odd lines.
thanks in advance
 
X

xxtoni

New Member
moris said:
hELLO sire,
can you give your adress in order to bay from you the chip that you did in order that new dx5print head works without odd lines.
thanks in advance
Click to expand...

He said that he would sell it IF he found a way to develop it, which is a long shot
 
SightLine

SightLine

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Yes - I'm interested to see about this as well. Also be nice if we determine what resistor values change between the IH47V and IF33V variants of the DX5 heads since that is what limits you to using older firmware for a JV33 or CJV30 with a non-oem head without getting a device construction error. I have removed the potting for both head models (oem with green connector IH47V and non-oem with black connector IF33V) but have still not had a chance to determine the difference in the resistors.
 
inkmed

inkmed

New Member
There is cracked card now, fit on printers, specially on China printers, the printer can use new DX5 head.

Adam Yang from Inkmed
 
SightLine

SightLine

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That's great news and all but so far still zero information about what exactly has been done to make them work.
 
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