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

[Ridgeracer24]

Had it for a month and its collected more dust than it has money on jobs its cut. Perfcut is an absolute nightmare and the internal software has glitches galore. slicing material randomly, losing position in the middle of a print cut job and cutting random shapes in random places in sheet (job ruined), cutting contour cuts twice for no reason, changing down force pressure in the middle of job randomly.
I was forced to spend $2,000 on my 13 yr old SP-300V just so i can try and save my reputation with my customers but i cant keep up with work volume(which is why i bought new equipment in the first place). Now my 13yr old SP-300V is paying my bill for my new equipment who else sees the problem here? That messed up! Had a tech here 3 times who knows nothing at all what hes looking at and cant fix it. Had i regional technician who trains other Roland techs to become techs and he didnt know anything he was looking at.
Roland Corporate California dicked me around for 2 weeks with no resolution. Ive gotten no where with Roland "dontCare" technical support and im beyond furious.
TO ANYONE THINKING OF BUYING a ROLAND STAY AWAY......there isnt any actual tech support its just a verbal run around while your business suffers everyday you dont have a working cutter. Doesnt matter how nice of a printer you buy from roland if your cutter cant cut it than the printers are useless.

 

[player]

Is it still under warranty?

 

[jriley]

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.

 

[Ridgeracer24]

Is it still under warranty?

Yes I've only had it a month (2yr warranty) and still haven't been able to perfcut the first job I received on it. The dealers been involved but corporate won't just replace it they told my dealer they thought it was user error. BS. There's only people with same issues since march 2017 so they haven't made a software patch to fix the glitches and keep pretending it doesn't exist so they don't have to address it.
Roland's gone the way of the cheap car companies, they make maintenance hog machines so they're techs and dealers get rich off of service calls. My dealer keeps talking VG, I wouldn't take a VG if someone gave me one. There's a ton of used ones for sale and they're not even old. I guess they don't test anything anymore just rush it to the market and let the consumer work out the bugs for ya at their customer and material expense. Roland don't care technical support is a JOKE.

 

[player]

Yes I've only had it a month (2yr warranty) and still haven't been able to perfcut the first job I received on it. The dealers been involved but corporate won't just replace it they told my dealer they thought it was user error. BS. There's only people with same issues since march 2017 so they haven't made a software patch to fix the glitches and keep pretending it doesn't exist so they don't have to address it.
Roland's gone the way of the cheap car companies, they make maintenance hog machines so they're techs and dealers get rich off of service calls. My dealer keeps talking VG, I wouldn't take a VG if someone gave me one. There's a ton of used ones for sale and they're not even old. I guess they don't test anything anymore just rush it to the market and let the consumer work out the bugs for ya at their customer and material expense. Roland don't care technical support is a JOKE.

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.

 

[CanuckSigns]

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.

 

[dhamlett15]

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.

 

[Solventinkjet]

they make maintenance hog machines so they're techs and dealers get rich off of service calls.

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.

 

[Roland Tech Support]

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

 

[Ridgeracer24]

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

I did... I spent 2 weeks talking with Sal and Kevin also had 3 separate tech visits with no luck. After 2 weeks of phone calls with corporate tech they finally came to the conclusion to not change offset during perf job and never addressed my pause and lost position issue not to mention my contour cut pressure changing during a job without touching anything. Some decals contour cut didn't finish the enitire shape of the cut on every sticker also. It's sitting here with the power cord draped over it for about 2 weeks, been messed up since the second week I've owned it.
I've gone up and down the roland corporate ladder, managers, techs, lead techs still sitting here collecting dust with no resolution. My name is Steve with a GR-640 from the northeast, ask someone in the tech office they'll know who I am just based on the little info I left you.

 

[CanuckSigns]

I did... I spent 2 weeks talking with Sal and Kevin also had 3 separate tech visits with no luck. After 2 weeks of phone calls with corporate tech they finally came to the conclusion to not change offset during perf job and never addressed my pause and lost position issue not to mention my contour cut pressure changing during a job without touching anything. Some decals contour cut didn't finish the enitire shape of the cut on every sticker also. It's sitting here with the power cord draped over it for about 2 weeks, been messed up since the second week I've owned it.
I've gone up and down the roland corporate ladder, managers, techs, lead techs still sitting here collecting dust with no resolution. My name is Steve with a GR-640 from the northeast, ask someone in the tech office they'll know who I am just based on the little info I left you.

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

 

[equippaint]

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 bitch about it. The machines are pretty basic and odds tend to favor the error being on the user.

 

[player]

I did... I spent 2 weeks talking with Sal and Kevin also had 3 separate tech visits with no luck. After 2 weeks of phone calls with corporate tech they finally came to the conclusion to not change offset during perf job and never addressed my pause and lost position issue not to mention my contour cut pressure changing during a job without touching anything. Some decals contour cut didn't finish the enitire shape of the cut on every sticker also. It's sitting here with the power cord draped over it for about 2 weeks, been messed up since the second week I've owned it.
I've gone up and down the roland corporate ladder, managers, techs, lead techs still sitting here collecting dust with no resolution. My name is Steve with a GR-640 from the northeast, ask someone in the tech office they'll know who I am just based on the little info I left you.

It's a racket.

 

[Ridgeracer24]

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.

Lol OK on my end. If it was as stupid as a cable change: I was smart enough to try changing that (and Ethernet) before I called bitching about it to my dealer. I've done more troubleshooting on my own machine than most owners would have time to do. Just cause I don't buy the first load of horse shit roland feeds me over the phone doesn't mean it's an error on my end.
That's the problem with some printer owners their so dumb they take everything a tech says and hold it to be true, it's mostly time buying excuses while they scramble behind the scenes trying to make one solution that fixes everyones cutter problems. Corporate has my file does all the same glitches, northeast corporate has my file and has all the same glitch errors (multiple glitches). Everyone is dragging ass trying to figure out a patch but it's taking forever. My business doesnt have time to beta test their GR software coding. If they paid me for it I wouldn't mind.

 

[decalman]

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