Roland Hi-Fi and Pro V8 (eight color) FJ 400, 500, 600 large format printers for fine art giclée

When you move up to the realm of fine art prints you need an Iris, Roland, Mutoh I-Jet, or Colorspan. If printing signs, posters or banners you want an Encad NovaJet or Hewlett-Packard DesignJet wide format printer (HP being the better of those two). If printing textile samples, or on fabric or other cloth, again, Colorspan, I-Jet, Mimaki, and Stork have special textile-printers.

If you have a large professional sign company, you can do almost everything with various Roland printers, but slowly. This makes it so much easier to keep all the printers running smoothly. Imagine if you had to have a technician trained in handling several completely different brands of wide format printers! Besides, Roland printers are solidly made and have a sterling reputation, albeit occasionally blemished with problems of banding caused by clogged printheads. I know one fine art giclée company that keeps their several Roland wide format printers running day and night and all weekend as well, every month, all year.

Older Roland's use six-colors of inks. This is the industry standard for Epson heads. Attempting to use 8 inkheads or 12 ink heads can increase productivity in theory, but not necessarily in reality. Actually the purpose of the eight slots is so you can load dual sets of CMYK, so you can print a path double width, and hence twice as much printing in the same amount of time. This is crucial for the Roland since its Epson piezo-electric printheads are so slow.

I am looking forward to the opportunity of seeing more my own digital photographs reproduced on a Roland HiFi printer. I am especially curious to see if Roland can match, or exceed, the professional quality of the color output and rich color depth of a ColorSpan 8-ink wide format printer (a printer I tested via Ilford's OEM version; Colorspan produces outstanding color fidelity in a photo-realistic manner). I am also curious to see if a Roland can surpass the quality of the ColorSpan DisplayMaker XII when the latter is set at maximum quality. So far indications are that the ColorSpan is less likely to have microbanding defects; banding is common on some Roland printers using some kinds of media.

Possible banding problems:
Roland equipment seems to be well made as we get few reports of structural problems. But a few other glitches ought to be covered. One woman said the heads crashed on ripples in the paper (possibly cockling, sometimes caused by excessive ink which causes usually cheap paper to buckle; the printheads then hit the top part of the ripples, rubbing or indeed smashing the heads). The Hewlett-Packard is able to survive head crashes, indeed I did a series of three head-crash tests, including the "total destruction" head crash test, and the head repaired itself after each progressively worse crash. The crash itself is easy to organize, just let the paper bunch up in a crumpled area and the heads smash into it. The HP simply did an an auto-test, its sensors naturally noted the parts of the heads the test destroyed, and the heads repaired themselves and the next self-test came out flawless.

But banding has now been reported by several users, so in fairness to Roland we are doing our best to ascertain what is causing this. We went to DRUPA printer trade show for some answers.

Perhaps six to ten ColorSpan printers were displayed throughout DRUPA. I did not notice a single Roland though surely there must have been at least one among the 18 giant halls. A few Encad's were scattered around, a few more Mutoh's, seldom a Mimaki, lots of Epson's (though most of them were not turned on, probably because they print so slowly); scores and scores of Hewlett-Packard's, in all halls where digital imaging was presented. Although HP itself had only a single booth, countless other companies were showing off their products with HP printers, primarily the 2xxx and 3xxx CP series as well as several dozen 1055CMs. I was surprised at the quality people were getting from the 1055 CM, as that is considered mainly for CAD, GIS, and signs, yet people were using PosterJet and other RIP´s to tweak photo-realistic enlargements out of it. However for photo-realistic and fine art the HP DesignJet 5000 is definitely better due to its new UV pigmented inks.

It is precisely because no Roland's were visible that I am still curious about the banding. I got one report that said banding only happened at certain modes, such as bi-directional (for speed), that if you set it to unidirectional (slow) this eliminated the banding. But another person got banding at every setting he tried, to the point he returned the printer to Roland. He was, however, new to large format technology, and thus I am wondering if perhaps he simply did not find the proper mode. Many other printers band if set to run too fast or if the RIP can’t feed the data quickly enough. This is a polite way of saying it may be as much the problem of the RIP and of the operator as of the printer. As soon as we get additional information we will follow up on these pages.

The most serious problem was the printer dropping colors, simply not printing one color. This has been reported at first only once, and here by a person who was new to large format printing, though he had the printer an estimated 1000 hours (most of which he said was lost to color management problems). Again, it seems that individuals may be selecting a printer or an entire technology for which they need more training. Whereas this individual reported that Roland said the dropped colors was a known bug in a few machines none of the other several Roland owners that we asked had ever experienced one color simply not printing for a given random area.

Solution: first, be wary of selecting a high-tech printer if you are a single individual on your own. If you have a professional trained and experienced operator, or if you are capable of taking a course, then a complex printer may be just fine. Then again, you may well get a good machine to begin with and never experience a single snafu, no matter how inexperienced and all-thumbs you may be. 2nd, if you are a single person, you should seriously consider starting off with a printer that takes care of itself with sensors, auto-cleaning station, etc. Start off with a solid proven workhorse and gain experience for six months or a year, then sell your printer while it is in good condition or trade it in on a newer model. Both Encad and Hewlett-Packard have good resale value precisely because they seemingly last forever. HP is as close to an easy plug-and-play printer as I have yet to experience. Encad, however, is not considered appropriate for fine art giclée due to its limited dpi.

Comments from actual users of Roland printers.

In my opinion (a person who just bought a Roland), the reasons to prefer Roland over Epson at this point are: better vendor support for archival 'giclée' fine art printing, 130 year Wilhelm rating; better color profile support; 25cm wider media." For more comments, click to this additional page of actual factual experiences with a Roland.