I've gotta say, I absolutely love this thread. I've been bitching about this kind of stuff for years to anyone who will listen... which is basically nobody... but the level of babying that these newer machines do is really really awful.
Stuart, your impression of a printer introducing itself is spot on and amazing
I long for the days of the 11880 when it was "oh shit, wait, I didn't mean to do that" and you could just yank the lever and the machine would dumbly return to main blank-face status. Now I run tons of material through a Canon PRO6000, PRO4000, and an Epson p20000 every day, and they all are so damn annoying with how many button presses it takes to do anything simple. In the UI dept, the current Epson wins hands down. My (least) favorite part of the Canon printers is having to explain to somebody who has never used one before how to CUT the damn paper off the roll over the phone:
Uh, tap the screen where it lists all the different loaded possibilities-- it's kind of a couple of squiggles with a "1" and a "2" next to them. Okay now tap "feed and cut". Now hit "Cut". Now confirm that cutting is actually what you want to do. Now it's going to back spin the roll feeder until it gets tension, so if the media has come un-taped to the roll, you have to either wait until it times out, or stick your hand in there and stop it from moving. Now it will very quickly and abruptly slice the paper so make sure your hands are in exactly the right places. Oh, and if you didn't advance the paper past the cutting point to begin with, you're gonna get about 1/16" of paper to handle with on that side. FFS. At least I have all the cover sensors disabled by shoving bits of paper everywhere so I can open the lid and actually SEE WHATS HAPPENING.
I regularly use Mimakis and Mutohs and other manner of industrial printers, and while they generally leave you alone more than these aqueous inkjets made for fussy Karen customer service harasser types, they still make incredibly odd decisions. Mimaki only had the ability to connect their printers via usb and not over ethernet until like... last year? And by far my most hated feature on any printer is the Mimaki "Remote" button. Basically, you have to turn the printer "online" before it will accept any commands from the computer or RIP. Otherwise, it will just sit there doing nothing. And if your ink is running low, it will switch itself to "local" (offline) mode after every single print. Meaning, if you launch two things back to back, you have to get up and press the f***ing button again before the second one will print. The amount of times I have launched something, then come back 30 minutes later to find that it's just sitting offline is staggering. WHO is this for??? I've heard one technician say that he likes it because it prevents the printer from just starting to print while he's trying to work on it.... but come on, just unplug the damn network cable.
I recently bought a 2.5m hybrid UV printer from a company in China called Blueprint, and I absolutely LOVE the way it operates. It does not care about me AT ALL. Backpack laying on the print bed? Who cares, let's smash $10K worth of print heads into it. Your problem, not mine-- this is how I want to be treated. It also gives me access to absolutely every tiny little value of alteration I could ever possibly use-- I can change the voltage on the heads individually, put whatever ink in it I want, use basically whatever RIP software I want, and if it doesn't print correctly, I'm responsible for figuring out why. I'm a professional printer, this is what I do. Essentially the thing operates like a CNC machine-- it's not checking to see if your fingers are in the way when the spinning bit comes thrashing through your hand.
My favorite anecdotal evidence of this manufacturer attitude was having the Epson Japan engineers come by to check up on our pre-production p20000, and when I told them about how ridiculously placed the maintenance tanks are (we had one become full in the middle of a 64" wide print, and in that case there's no way to even access it without cutting the paper off with a knife to get to the tank slot) they looked at my Mutoh and asked if I would prefer a solution like it has-- which is just a BUCKET. "Um, yes of course I would" I said, and "if you wouldn't mind my asking, what is the reasoning behind NOT doing that, and instead making us use these tampon-filled plastic cartridges that need to be replaced every couple of weeks and thrown in the trash". The answer they gave me was "oh, we think that from experience a lot of our users like to place their large format printers on carpets, so they wouldn't want any ink to drip".
also, deanwork, to answer your question-- a resounding NO to the heads requiring fewer cleanings part. The cleanings are far longer and arduous than ever. However, I would say that the heads perform better ultimately. They are fantastic print heads, and incredibly fast, but just as prone to clogging as ever. Honestly, I'm not even sure it is physically possible for piezoelectric based heads to BE less clog-prone at this point. Epson needs to start treating their heads as a consumable like everyone else does, because they always have been. At least in their new DTG machines you have the option to replace them yourself.
sheesh /endrant
