Need Help Roland TrueVIS SG-300 Grainy Prints

Hey guys how's it going? I bought a SG-300 a few weeks ago and now that I'm printing noticed that some colors are coming out grainy. Its worse on the color green and gray but present in most colors. I was given a couple of steps, by my dealer, to try and fix this but in the end made no difference. I recalibrated Bi-Directional printing, it was off by a little bit, but that didn't help(i also tried printing uni-directional and it made no difference) and I raised the print heat up to 110F (dryer is at 114F.) In the end I went back to my dealer and was told that the printer will always print grainy, that there's no printer that prints like solid paint. The thing is, its very noticeable so I have my doubts and I'm hoping this machine prints better quality that it currently is.

A little info that might help: I output as PDF 1.7 (acrobat 8) with no compression and 400DPI rasterization, anything vector stays vector. I work with Pantone coated swatches in CMYK/8 US SWOP v2 and sometimes RGB/8 sRGB IEC61966-2.1 depending on the content I'm provided with. The materials I've printed on are Orajet 3640 and Roland ESM-GCVP and their appropriate profiles. The material doesn't make a difference, I've even tried switching the profiles around. I've tried Max Impact and overprinting, overprinting helped a little but it wastes more ink and and changes the shade of the colors. Any tips/advice please?

 

That's not good at all, the machine is only 3 weeks old. Thank you for the info, are there any test print other than the one I currently have, that can prove individually that each alignment is off? Because my dealer already waived it off as operating under normal thresholds. Or can I contact Roland and have a new technician adjust everything under warranty?

 

I'll give Roland a call tomorrow, hopefully there's a technician close by. Do you believe this is covered by warranty or will I have a hefty bill to deal with after everything is set up?

 

I also noticed on the very first weekly manual cleaning that that there are little chunks of ink around the right print head where the cap tops touch. Is that normal? I've done manual cleanings about 6 times and there's always at least a little strip.

These are the state of the right print head before every manual cleaning. The left head has never had any sort of chunks or debris.





I took a picture of both left and right just right now, and as always the right print head it bad. This is after cleaning it earlier today.
I almost looks as if the ink turns gooey and is dragged along when the cap top is released off of the print head, like stepping on gum.




I was told this was also normal and just needed to get a swab with cleaning solution and place it over the gunk. Seeing as the manual say to not do that, I didn't take the advice and hoped the cap top would deal with it.

 

C5, should I set the periodic cleaning to a lower timer? Its currently set to 160 minutes. I'm located in Jurupa Valley, California.

I haven't noticed any banding although the contour cutting is just a little off on stickers sometimes, it does get pretty bad on HTV though. I really hope there's no need to exchange the machine, I really wouldn't like to waste money having to move things around.

I'm going to do that Canuck, this isn't the first time I have problems with equipment bought from them. Last time it was a heat press that took about 10 or so months to fix. As for the goop, it hasn't affected my printing just yet, but I do fear its going to affect the life span of the print head, especially because sometimes I find the goop getting closer to the center.

This is some pretty disheartening news guys, I hope I get lucky and the tech manages to fix it, but it looks like there might be a long road ahead of me with a bunch of tech visits. I will keep updating this until it's 100% dealt with. Thank you all so much for the info and help!

 

The thing is that it would be a very big loss, at least to me. I'd have to pay a 10% restocking fee, take the loss on the install fees, and pay to have the machine shipped back. Plus whatever jobs lost and down time I have to deal with. I'll will seriously look into it though, if the technician can't fix it 100% on the first try. Also, I only plan on having this machine for about 10 months before I upgrade to a 54 inch printer.

Ah okay, yeah I do the manual cleaning about 3-4 days apart since I'm printing a bunch.

 

I went through McLogan I've been with them every since I started pretty much

 

Hopefully I don't need to go as far that, I believe if I seriously talk to them or a technician writes off the machine as defect, they'll refund my money. We'll see on Monday. Any clue as to who I should contact though? The only phone number Roland seems to have is a sales number, do I just call that? Or can anybody recommend a trustworthy technician in the SoCal Jurupa area or close proximity that will work under warranty please?