New Printer?

We are in the process right now of purchasing this very machine. Can't answer your questions directly, but Roland enjoys a very, very good name in this industry. We are currently trying to sell our Roland SP-540v. (see member to member classifieds on this forum site)

I can tell you that I have found the Roland easy to use, very reliable, as inexpensive as any machine. The cutter works well, but we use our Summa mainly for that purpose.

 

Considering the VS 540I...

Given the 2000 dollar rollback pricing going on right now should make your decision even easier. Mines on the way now.

 

We own this printer. Purchased it in November. It is inked up CMYKLcLmLbW. The light black is great. We print a lot of gray scale so it helps a lot. The white ink has not panned out the way I hoped. It's too thin so if you print on dark media the color shows. Technically it runs great but we did have many weeks with issues with the Lb. Had to constently clean the head over and over. Had the tech out 5 times. Wasted a bunch of ink.Turns out that their was a software issue with the printer. A firmware upgrade fixed it. Now it runs great. We use the cutter to cut vinyl logos every week. You can change the blade without messing with the blade setting. Very cool! The contour cut feature is a nice feature. We purchased the Benz dryer with fans unit. I am glad we did this, helps dry the prints faster. You might want to purchase a takeup reel. Did not do that because we print mostly stuff under 30" but I think we should have. If you don't, you will have to babysit the printer when you do anything over 48" long. It prints on all kinds of medias. We have printed on adhesive vinyl, paper, magnetic, window cling, scrim vinyl, chrome vinyl (some issues with metallic smooth chrome, media sometimes comes off the backer sheet due to the heat). Going to try tshirt media soon. All the samples I have seen look great. I think the contour cut feature will come in very handy with this media. A few other things. The printer does create heat and the vinyl media starts to smell and the ink smells too. We purchased an mobile air condition unit and also an inline fan to suck the heat and smell out of the small room.

 

I was told you need to gently manually shake the white ink periodically and definitely right before printing. Not so much that you put air bubbles in the ink though.

 

best advice for white ink is transfer it to a clear cartridge and move any ID chip. if you do that you can let your white ink cart sit for weeks. then when you want to use white, plug it in (or however Roland works) and tilt the clear cartridge back and forth however long is needed to get the pigment to come off the bottom. with an opaque cartridge there's no way at all to "know" when you truly dispersed the white pigment. this pigment settles right the bottom so you have to blend it for good opacity.