I have had the 100s since around October of 2005. It has always had issues and despite efforts has never worked well. It has been proven to be a printer that produces great prints, when it works.
I have never been able to let it run unattended. That's a real problem for a long banner that can take hours to complete. I have lost jobs because of ink dropping on the surface of the media or ink that gets trapped under the guides leaving long lines of ink running the length of the piece.
The takeup system is in need of a redesign. It will not spool evenly, even with the "enhancement kit" that should be more accurately be called a "necessity kit". I only received this after repeated calls on spooling problems and making quite a fuss with them. When it does not roll up evenly, it will fold the media and the weighted bars end up getting jammed up.
The accuracy of the print length is poor. If you try and fit and print to a partucular installation you will find it will be way off. There is a .5% tolerance allowed. The longer the print the worse it becomes and the feed adjustment adds to this problem.
I have had many parts swapped out and have been through head replacements due to nozzles that have a problem of not firing. Cleaning themselves did not always do the trick The last changout was a circuit board. Many jumper wires were present indicating this is still in development.
There are times the control panel gets locked up. This forces you to kill the power to reset it.
Daily cleaning is an issue. You need to have media loaded in order to access the service menu.
It does burn quite a bit of ink in the head cleaning process. Along with the recommended setup of having it clean during a print cycle there is a cleaning that takes place every 20 hours, if the machine has not been used.
Rather than bore you with more details of this printer let me caution you to test your unit throughly before signing off on it.
I have to tell you I know exactly what you are going through. I had alot of the same problems you are having, but there is hope. I finally had enough, I called my distributor and Seiko and told them what I thought. I told them that day I would drag the thing behind my truck and leave it at their door that afternoon. Then I finally got a response where they sent their engineer out to completely rebuild the machine on-site. Prior to this guy I had four technicians out to fix it from all over the place. I have to say after their guy came out and did the repairs, we have had no problems. We run two and three hundred banners at a time without a problem. You need to call Seiko and get David Mulkey on the phone, he should be able to help you. I found this site on accident today and just thought you should know there is hope.
The 100s was finally hauled out of here. It was replaced with all new Roland AJ-1000. What a nice printer. No daily maintenance needed. Just a simple wipe down every 1.2-2 weeks and you are good to go. Heads run clog free much longer than the Seiko. I think the key to this is that the Roland uses what appear to be the same inks (the chip inside the cartridge says Seiko) but the picoliter size is larger, about 40. Much larger drop, a bit grainer on the print, but the trade off is less problem.
