What makes Roland printers so much more expensive than Mimaki?

[WhatsYourSign?]

I'm getting ready to buy a new printer and I'm looking at the Roland VG2 vs the Mimaki CJV150.


Roland clearly has better marketing materials than Mimaki does but as far as feature sets and print quality, I have found strengths of both systems.


What is it about Roland systems that justifies their price premium?


Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

I don't know about the newer printers but the older ones refuse to die. I like the build quality and materials they use.. they didn't feel cheap or flimsy like other brands. The SP-300 and 540 just kept going and going and really were not that hard to maintain. I could call up Roland in California and easily chat with the techs when I needed help with something.

 

[player]

My VP 540i is more advanced than the SP540v, but the VP is nowhere near the build quality and reliability of the SP in my opinion.

 

[SameDay Signs]

Had both types and would take mimaki any day...i think they are tanks that hardly have issues if taken care of...they both print great so all preference is it not?

 

[BigfishDM]

I'm getting ready to buy a new printer and I'm looking at the Roland VG2 vs the Mimaki CJV150.


Roland clearly has better marketing materials than Mimaki does but as far as feature sets and print quality, I have found strengths of both systems.


What is it about Roland systems that justifies their price premium?


Thanks in advance for any help!

Ever check out latex?

 

[WhatsYourSign?]

Ever check out latex?

Yeah, we have an HP L26500 right now but the quality is disappointing and it seems to require a lot more maintenance than our Mimaki.

We also have issues color matching previous prints which is a problem because we do a lot of wraps.

 

[fresh]

we picked mimaki because the print quality was amazing. i think our machine is about 8 years old at this point, and we've never had a problem. i make a joke that even when I try, I can't get it to print poorly.

 

[petepaz]

just my opinion but i think roland and mimaki are close in quality and production. pricing i didn't notice them being that different (at least from the dealers we dealt with) i think it depends on sales and which machines they want to move at the time. we have all rolands and our last one was the roland truvis vg which we were comparing to the mimaki (i forget which model ) but roland gave us a better deal at the time so since we were familiar with the rip and and how to use the machine we went roland. if the pricing works out stay with what you are familiar with less learning cutrve and you can hit the ground making money.

 

[Andy D]

Plus one for Mimaki, I use a Roland now, and it prints great, but there's a bunch of small
irritating things about it, like the take-up reel is near impossible to get set up right.

 

[Gino]

A very big selling point is not the printer itself, but the inks, service and tech support afterwards that counts more. There are Roland techs everywhere. I don't know how abundant Mimaki techs are.

 

[pinkiss]

Rolands were originally made in Japan, some decades old printers plotters as someone said just refuse to die, minimal service and issues. Thou that concept has been lost in recent years so more choices for better price.

 

[petepaz]

A very big selling point is not the printer itself, but the inks, service and tech support afterwards that counts more. There are Roland techs everywhere. I don't know how abundant Mimaki techs are.

yeah i left out that part, which is very important. where is your service tech located and where do supplies come from, how quick can either of them get to you when you need them.

 

[Solventinkjet]

A very big selling point is not the printer itself, but the inks, service and tech support afterwards that counts more. There are Roland techs everywhere. I don't know how abundant Mimaki techs are.

In my experience as a tech there are more Roland techs out there but once you can fix a Roland you can also fix a Mimaki and Mutoh and Epson because they all use the same print heads and ink systems. Mimaki and Roland are starting to use Ricoh heads in their machine more an more as well but at the end of the day, I am officially trained on Mutoh and Mimaki printers but I fix Rolands all the time and we aren't even a dealer for them.

 

[equippaint]

In this instance, I don't think that the price difference is indicative of anything. Both would be comparable. We bought the Mimaki because it was 7k less than the Roland at the time and am glad that we did. These machines are all pretty similar in how they work and get repaired. Main difference seems to be navigating the menus and deciphering the terms each manufacturer uses.

 

[HulkSmash]

new Rolands have a ton of lemons out there, and to be frank they're overpriced by.. well a lot.

Nothing beats the new Gen Latex 360+ machines. Trust me i've tried them all.

and literally 0 maintenance on my latex machines.

 

[CSOCSO]

good luck color matching prints with roland. WILL NEVER HAPPEN.

 

[BigfishDM]

Yeah, we have an HP L26500 right now but the quality is disappointing and it seems to require a lot more maintenance than our Mimaki.

We also have issues color matching previous prints which is a problem because we do a lot of wraps.

Yeah, on the older gen there were some issues. Lol on the maintenance, that is just flat out not true (at least with the new gen units) There is like ZERO maintenance on the latex. The biggest wrap shops in the industry run latex. I would highly recommend reaching out to your local latex dealer and getting some prints made of your files, I think you will be very impressed with the newer models.

 

[WhatsYourSign?]

Yeah, on the older gen there were some issues. Lol on the maintenance, that is just flat out not true (at least with the new gen units) There is like ZERO maintenance on the latex. The biggest wrap shops in the industry run latex. I would highly recommend reaching out to your local latex dealer and getting some prints made of your files, I think you will be very impressed with the newer models.

That's been my experience with our L26500 but it's an older unit so that may be why.

What have you seen with the color matching? That's been a struggle with ours. I originally bought it thinking it would be great for wraps but the color matching challenge has made that less desirable. Perhaps they've improved this in future generations as well.

 

[BUCKY]

A very big selling point is not the printer itself, but the inks, service and tech support afterwards that counts more. There are Roland techs everywhere. I don't know how abundant Mimaki techs are.

Except for Wisconsin where there are only two Vendor/ techs that we know of. It usually takes about two weeks to get them out once you put in a call.
Tried to get one from Chicago but they said it was to far. May be a territory thing? Not sure.

 

[FactorDesign]

Yeah, on the older gen there were some issues. Lol on the maintenance, that is just flat out not true (at least with the new gen units) There is like ZERO maintenance on the latex. The biggest wrap shops in the industry run latex. I would highly recommend reaching out to your local latex dealer and getting some prints made of your files, I think you will be very impressed with the newer models.

I'll confirm that the newer gen latex machines are basically maintenance free. We've had ours for a few months now and it's almost worrying how little you need to touch the thing. I'm used to bi-weekly ecosolvent cleaning for roland and epson machines, but the HP 560 just does it's thing and keeps running roll after roll without much issue. The only drawback with this particular machine is if you do short runs and swap media a lot, since you'll have a lot of waste from loading.