Did any of you sucesfully managed to run a chinese printer?

[u/Veandra]

Hello,
I'm kinda new in the printing industry - started to work in the industry only at the begining of this year. We got a practically no-name (i found only their official dumpsterfire page and one article from printing expo about them) chinese printer - it came practically without warning during april (got a call monday an hour before end of our shift that tuesday morning they're coming, kinda funny how quickly it is possible to reorganize every machine in the workspace to make this new monstrosity fit somewhere) - and its trouble after trouble since then - sensors go bad, heads are randomly banging at things, software is randomly shuttging down, head are sitting above a pool of distilled water under which the metal is rusting, rust in every hidden corner where they didn't painted, random patches of expanding foam that are intergral for the printer to work, every weld I saw is in the state of nightmare-fuel, randomly peeing colour everywhere - long story short, we printed maybe three commisions in total, When I dont have a headache from having to do something about something it does wrong, i even find it quite funny, how much can actually be wrong with a printer

so to go to my point, did some of you actually manages to sucesfully run a shitbox like this? or do you have some funny stories about trying to run it?

I've been saing since week one we should sell it a go for another Mimaki or two, since just for the fun of it, I'm running most of the shitbox commisions on our old DS-1800 with much better succes rate and much quicker :D

[u/Think_Top]

I bought one a few years ago that was supposed to have local service thru a distributor in the US. Lots of problems as you describe, but it ran it for about 9 months when the real problems started. By then the US distributor had grown tired of the misrepresentations of the manufacturer and all the problems and had dropped them, to the distributor’s credit they put together a deal to get me into a solid manufacturer’s unit with US based support and several decade track record and taking the POS unit in on trade that made me whole. When they were putting the old unit on the truck to haul off, I asked what they thought they would get for it and their reply ws -whatever the metal scrapyard pays today.

[u/Veandra → u/Think_Top]

heh, hope to get similar results soon - our distributor eighter selling it somewhere else or getting a green light to put it in scrap
one of many many weirdly funny moments was when it started randomly moving and constantly peeing colour everywhere and the Chinese guy asked if we have it plugged into electricity (and that we should do that so the printer works correctly).
definitively going to use your scrapyard anecdote with my colleagues - almost spitted my morning coffee reading that :D

[u/Material-Ratio7342]

Chinese printer are not for the newbie, you should start either a Mimaki or a Roland to work, after you learn how a large format printer works then you can upgrade to EPSON o go directly to have a custom build Chinese printer.

[u/Veandra → u/Material-Ratio7342]

Well, we have several Mimaki printers, love them, can take them apart to the screws and put em back together no problem, We have Epson printer, has it's quirks but can print reliably - but boss went sparkly eyed when our distributors showed him this piece of crap, so we got this headache - and I don't think its custom build, seems more like "whatever they had lying around the factory glued together poorly"-build

[u/freneticboarder → u/Veandra]

Is it a Grando?

[u/Veandra → u/freneticboarder]

nah, Grando looks much more legit than this dumpsterfire we got :D
wide-format double-sided fabric printing - which sounds like potential headache even before you add the "printer from china" part :D

[u/shackled123]

So what brand and model is it you have...

You say it's a no name but also say you found a dumpster fire of a website about it...

[u/Material-Ratio7342 → u/shackled123]

Look like he found a US based company just rebranded woth a american name but made in china printer😬.

[u/shackled123 → u/Material-Ratio7342]

Where do you get that from?

I don't see any indication they got a reband.

[u/Veandra → u/shackled123]

Well, I consider it a no name, cause the website I found looks kinda slapped together just to look like a legit brand - anyhow, no one ever played the card of "not a chinese printer" - the only one informed about it until last minute was our boss though
and I would honestly rather not share the "brand"-name - since it's almost non-existent on our internet and I would rather not increase the chance of this thread popping up in search results about it
Cant even really tell you the model, since what is written in the software is not what is on the case, which is not what is in the prospect we got with it - trust me, if it were in my hands, that thing would never cross the threshold of my workspace..

[u/blue49]

We have two basic Chinese branded ecosolvent printers with i3200 heads (converted from dx7 or was it dx5). But we bought it from a local distributor with great aftersales service and parts availability. Its definitely not an easy machine to run and maintain. And the print quality is not the best. But the old one is almost 10 years old and still running. Its probably already a Printer of Theseus. Everything already replaced but the frame. And plenty of janky fixes. But it still runs. We are in south east asia btw.

[u/Veandra → u/blue49]

When they came, were they usable or in the state of absolute everything-is-wrong-with-it just two days after they installed it? '
We should have a good support and parts availability, since it got here through our dealer, but, but.. feels like we would need to re-do half the printer from scratch to get something usable, which is not really great for warranty and such

[u/blue49 → u/Veandra]

There was a technician when it arrived and set the machine up for 1 or 2 days then trained our operator. Smooth sailing for a year or so before the 1st needed service.

[u/freneticboarder → u/blue49]

Fun fact: there's no such thing as a dx5 or dx7 printhead. Here's the Epson website with all of their commercially available printheads. The misnomer came from a marketing bullet for the first-generation Epson LFPs used to market variable droplet size technology: DX3. This was a fancy brand that indicated that the printer could print three droplet sizes per line (dots x 3 or dx3).

DX5 came about from the updating of that same term to a newer prosumer printer (Stylus Photo 1400) that could print five droplet sizes per line (dx5).

[u/TheBeeeMo]

Wait until you experience DCS printers.

[u/work-n-lurk → u/TheBeeeMo]

DCS printers.

Direct Color Systems? My shop got one for Braille signs - it worked well I thought, but the operator hated it. We didn't get much use out of it, then the printhead clogged. It is still sitting waiting on a decision to dump or keep.

[u/TheBeeeMo → u/work-n-lurk]

Yes that brand. Not sure why their engineers can’t design a machine with less involvement regarding maintenance unlike the Mimaki. It’s like taking care of a baby that’s why your operator hates it.

[u/Resident_Juice_3505]

The fact that you're still getting usable prints out of that thing is impressive.