Roland GR-640 Cutter is a POS stay away DONT BUY!

Is it still under warranty?

 

Are you working with your dealer? They need to be working with Roland to escalate the issue. If they can't fix the plotter, they will replace it. Stick with it, man. They will back the product.

 

Take it back and tell them to refund your money. First document (video and samples) the defects. Record all the correspondence. Then take them to small claims court for selling you a defective device.

 

We had a very similar experience with a Roland printer, at the end of the day our local dealer stepped up to the plate and bought the machine back from us, but if it was up to Roland head office they would still be swapping parts one by one 2 times a week to see if it worked.

 

I have had a gr-540 for about a year now and have had issues but not as bad as you have had.

Roland has been slow to answer on anything and my dealer is now out of business.

My biggest problem now is everything in the cut plot window in flexi is flipped to the wrong side from what it cuts and if I try and use poll size the plotter gets an error and sometimes flexi shuts down. I have had flexi work on this issue and they could not fix it.

 

I got a kick out of this. First of all I agree that all printer companies are making it artificially harder to fix their machines and adding unnecessary sponges and doohickies. But to think Roland or any other manufacture cares about us lowly field techs getting rich is laughable. Service calls are expensive for many reasons but the main reason is that it's highly specialized. When your car breaks down you have a choice of multiple mechanics even in rural areas. When your printer goes down, there may only be only a few certified techs in your state. For 9 years I was the only Mimaki and Mutoh certified tech in Colorado. The only reason I am not the only one anymore is because we now have 2 certified techs! So when you hire a tech from a dealer like me, the dealer has to justify a full time salary. You can't do that if a service call only brings in $100. Of course I have other responsibilities that help justify the salary like running the E commerce site but my boss wouldn't be able to afford to keep me around on service calls alone. So the dealer is too expensive and you look for alternatives. You might not find any in certain states. But you get lucky and find an independent tech and they charge more than the dealer! Why? Because they do have to make their entire salary on service calls. Even the best tech in the country has weeks where no one calls. In order to be financially stable they have to charge more.

Also, even as a parts supplier, I agree that the parts prices are artificially inflated but it's not at the dealer level. The problem is that Roland, Mutoh, and Mimaki don't actually manufacture most of their parts. Epson does. So Epson marks it up and sells it to them, then they mark it up and sell it to their American counter parts. Then the American divisions of those companies mark up the part again and then sell them to the dealers. Then the dealers try to get the scraps that are left and sell it to the customer. After 10 years of selling parts and being a field tech, I have determined that the actual cost of manufacturing a DX5 head is less than $200. So why is the list price near $3000 from most printer manufactures? All the reasons above. Too many middlemen.

 

Hello RidgeRacer24,

We ask that you reach back out to Roland Technical Support. We are always willing to help with any issue our customers have.

Thank you,

Roland Technical Support

 

Have you spoken with Jericho from Roland? he was pretty good about getting my issues resolved.

 

Perfcut is notoriously a pain. If you really want to resolve the problem, you need to take a hard look at your end of things and I think that is what they are nicely trying to tell you. It is not their job to check functionality of your files. I got pissed off after my Mimaki install, weird crap happening and the tech said change your USB cable. I said there's no way, its the same cable I used on my Roland and for the setup, it isn't possible. Well, that did the trick. Either you want the problem fixed or you just want to ***** about it. The machines are pretty basic and odds tend to favor the error being on the user.

 

It's a racket.

 

Too bad Roland is screwing people.
I changed over to Summa .
So far, I'm quite happy.