Roland VP300 Versacamm and Roland BN desktop

[Andrew]

The price of the Gumtree SP is too good to be true. They can easily sell for double that so cannot see any reason for anyone having to drop that low. I would be extremely cautious.

[Paul]

wach the humtree scamers guys!
I wanted to buy rolland cutter that was priced 50% below the avrage second hand price.
no much in tdescription. only that its in good condition and please provide phone nunmber for more info.

I contacted them via email with 3 questions. reply was: please provide phone number.

I emailed them again and said that please reply for 3 basic question first before we can have good chat about machine and how we going to manage this transaction.
another answer was: Please provide your phone number. Thats it!
Clearly something stinky going on there! propobly selling ppl phone numbers or something. this cutter was on gum tree for ages!

[Andrew]

The ad has been removed so must have been dodgy.

[Justin]

Lol, I got confirmation that seller is being investigated for fraud . I'll offer him less then!!!

[P4UL]

I have no connection with the seller, just spotted the ad this morning lol. At least, a lesson learned!

[gstk]

We were in the market for BN-20 but everywhere we went we were told the same thing.fantastic machine but we would grow out of it very quickly,to slow and not as wide as the rolands.we went with a secondhand VP300 cost the same as a new BN but we have never looked back
all i can say to you is its your choice.
stu

Can I ask where you got the secondhand VP from. (PM if you like)

My only concern with second hand is the warranty and buying something I know nothing about I could be sold a complete pup.

[Hyraxx]

When buying second hand your walking into a minefield unless you get it from a reputable company who took X in part exchange, as you never know when the head might just stop working, though its not too bad on the older Versacamms as they only have 2 heads so you're looking at around 1.2k for replacement heads then having to book an service guy to install then thats anywhere from£250-500+

[gstk]

When buying second hand your walking into a minefield unless you get it from a reputable company who took X in part exchange, as you never know when the head might just stop working, though its not too bad on the older Versacamms as they only have 2 heads so you're looking at around 1.2k for replacement heads then having to book an service guy to install then thats anywhere from£250-500+

My thoughts exactly. Speed isnt really an issue (we are not exactly fighting them from the door at the moment) and not really into large format banners and wraps etc. I would love the 300 but funds prob dont allow.

[Johnny]

We looked into a new printer about 12/18 months ago and ended up buying a BN-20. There wasn't a big enough difference in our eyes to go for an SP.

In all honesty its possibly one of the most robust machines I've ever come across, you can literally throw anything at it and it'll have a go. (except magnetic material we found!) We've printed everything through it from Cotton & Polyester Canvas, Heat Transfer Material, Adhesive & Cling Stickers, Card, etc. There's not actually that much in the machine that you can break, it's a fairly sealed unit, but if you can get a care package of some kind.

You'll find that most materials, whether it be roll up banners or garment transfer is manufactured in 1500mm (or thereabouts) or 1370mm rolls. Garment tends to be cut down into 3x500mm and 2x750mm, so you'll never get a 1000mm or a 1300mm as standard. Though you can order them specially if you order enough.

We use a company called Signmaster for inks and vinyl now, speak to consumables, they can get you anything for digital print, and where needed he'll cut down to size.
If you only need a single roll of something, I'd recommend Xpres as they store 500mm rolls as standard,

Ink for the BN-20 is around 85-90 a cartridge @ 440ml. We were told we'd need a set every 8 months but we got through most of it in 2 months. The only real outlay is at the start since you'll cover the cost as you print the jobs anyway.
A waste tank is about £60, and (unless someone has other experiences) they don't recycle them - however, you can unscrew the lid, pull out the absorbent pads and leave them out to dry for a few days, then plug it in again - so get an extra one. The hardware doesn't know how full the tank is, it estimates based on the time you plugged it in and how much waste ink it's pumped into it, so you can't mess it up.

The printing speed is about 4m/hr, which compared to what we were using before (an inkjet and dedicated cutter) was something of a miracle to just have the machine spew it out. You'll find the printer will slow down if you add metallic or white into the fifth ink dock on it. About half the speed according to our supplier, so we never touched it, and we've never needed them anyway. If something needs white then we use a white backed vinyl or outsource it, but it's very rare.

We bought ours from Xpres, not particularly good on the training since we found we could do a lot more than they had told us. The two profiles that they supplied were for their two different material types, sticker and garment. Garment runs bi-directional print, and sticker runs uni-directional (half the speed to stop it coagulating on the surface).

The software (Roland Versaworks) allows you to do the following:
Varied printing - feed it a spreadsheet of names, numbers or linked images and it will sequentially spew them out - you use bounding boxes in your artwork to specify these things.
Bi-direction/Uni-direction Print - You can give the print a second to dry by only printing in one direction. We have some instances on glossy material where the print gloops together if not given the time.
You can add in profiles for different materials if the supplier has them to hand.
There's plenty of functions to group jobs together, print multiples within groups or individually, mirror, rotate, spacing, roll-back-and-cut distance settings, scaling, etc.

We find it doesn't really cope well with having jobs cancelled manually (ie: lifting the hand while in mid print/cut), it won't damage it, but it takes an off/on of the printer and the software to clear it's memory quickly. If you have the time though it makes no difference.

The machine won't run when it's below 15degreesC, and in our warehouse that can be a problem at night, so we put a little radiator heater by it and it's happy now. We can leave the machine running now and it'll just chew through a roll.

You can print a colour reference chart on any material you have and these link to a colour palette in Illustrator/CorelDraw so you can pick an exact colour you want and know it will come out right. The printer doesn't use reference marks printed on the material, instead it just rolls back as far as it needs and starts cutting - we've never had any problems with where it's cut, but to be aware that you can't stop the job and cut it later, needs to be done all at once. Don't overload the software with too many eps files or it takes ages to load!

It has problems when cutting too close to the front of the roll since the pressure of the knife pulls the material back, but you overcome this by leaving three or four centimetres of material in front of the job, or not cutting the previous job off until a bit is out the machine.

One of the first big jobs we did was for 10'000 200x200mm hi-tack stickers, they cut down a 1370mm to 3x440mm rolls and sent them over. Looking at somewhere in the region of 2 months of 12hr/day printing. Could it handle it? Hell yes!
Though you just need something to catch the material off the machine, a Tesco home delivery tray will do it, with gloss material it takes a little longer, put a box under one end of a table and let it roll down it to dry for a little longer.

It's given us very few problems in the time we've had it, and even though we're now using a Mimaki CJV30-130, we use the BN-20 for short runs or overflow, LB logos, sleeves, bags, etc.


The SP-300 (which we don't have so my information is a little limited...) I know only the following about:
5m/hr (if the 1m/hour is really that necessary then you've got too much work on and should be getting a BIG machine!)
750mm rolls (only worth it if you're printing anything which is bigger than 470mm on BOTH sides)
Print resolution (i believe) is the same at 1440dpi.
Faster cutting & print speed. (again if it makes that much difference then you need a bigger machine.)
A pot to collect waste in (which doesn't cost anything)


Just one more quick thought, I can happily leave the BN-20 running overnight to run off 1000 or more LB logos, the thing will just pump them out.

Hope that's helpful, although a little disjointed!!
J.

[Johnny]

My bad, I had SP in my head, not VP. Ooops!