There only seems to be one official pic of the BN-20. Here’s an alternative of one in the wild, among the books and cables of Digital Printer’s sumptuous office.
Roland’s VersaStudio BN-20 offers the functions of a large format eco-solvent printer-cutter in a compact package for under £6000. Simon Eccles tries it out.
If you’re considering a move into sign and display printing, could this cute little desktop eco-solvent printer-cutter from Roland DG be just the ticket?
While sharing technology with the company’s large format inkjets, this 20 inch (500 mm) media width VersaStudio BN-20 is remarkably compact and at £5499, very low cost too. It was first seen in the UK at last year’s Sign & Digital Show, and finally we got our hands on a test model over the summer.
The BN-20 has a wide gamut CMYK inkset plus a fifth colour that’s either metallic silver or opaque white depending on what you order (once loaded, you can’t switch colours later). The built-in contour knife can cut intricate shapes in the same run, or if you need to
laminate the job offline then it can register itself to printed marks and perform the cut as a second run-through.
It seems ideal for a small printing house that wants to broaden its offerings into self-adhesive labels, window graphics and small signs and POS materials, with contour cutting. The 1440 dpi maximum resolution (courtesy of Epson print heads) means it can produce smooth photographic prints. Alternatively it might be handy for a company that already has a larger Roland printer, to install in its studio so designers can test new jobs with the same inks and media without interrupting production. Mat Drake, Roland’s UK business manager, says that the BN-20 is popular with small garment printers for heat transfers, where the relatively slow speed doesn’t matter as it’s still faster than the heat press stage.
The BN-20 uses Roland’s well established Eco-Sol Max light solvent inks. These can print on virtually anything, including self-adhesive vinyls and other plastics, plus coated or uncoated papers and thin card, as well as heat transfer materials. Unlike ‘strong’ solvent inks, these have very little smell during printing and their vapour isn’t particularly hazardous, so you can use them in an office without forced ventilation. The ink doesn’t smell after drying, so you can use it for indoor displays.
Two styles of clear static cling labels, with and without a white ink backing.
The downside is that the ink doesn’t etch itself into plastic surfaces as much as stronger solvent inks, so outdoor life is reduced to about two years compared to five (this can be extended by lamination). The BN-20 has a 35 deg C heated bed that opens up pores in vinyl materials so the ink keys into it better. There’s no heated drying bed, but the printer is so slow that this doesn’t seem to be a problem.
The 220 cc Eco-Sol cartridges cost about £55 each for CMYK and about £65 for white, but metallic cartridges are around £155, which will bump up the price of special effects jobs. Water based Roland FPG pigment inks can be used for indoor graphics if you prefer.
Our test printer was brand new and was set up in our office by Joe Wigzell, Roland DG’s UK Academy and Creative Centre manager. It took a couple of hours.
The Eco-Sol Max inks fit in slots on the right hand side. The white ink is on the left.
With a footprint of just 995 x 585 mm and weighing 35 kg, it’s suitable for a sturdy table or benchtop, although a steel stand can be supplied. The penalty for such compactness is an odd maximum media width of 508 mm (20 inches), though in practise the RIP refuses to be set to media widths above 480 mm. As it can’t print to the edge of the media, we found the maximum printable width on 500 mm media is about 470 mm (18.5 inches).
The maximum media thickness is 1 mm if you are just printing; for cutting it is 0.4 mm with liner or 0.22 mm without liner.
Helping the office-friendliness is the silence when in sleep mode, although it’s fairly noisy (officially 42 dB) when awake and especially when printing (65 dB), which goes on for a long time as it’s pretty slow. It will go to sleep and become silent about ten minutes after the last operation, but if this is too long then you can press the front panel button to send it to sleep immediately.
The printer has no built-in controls. There’s a master power switch on the back that’s on all the time, plus a secondary button on the front that you use to put the printer to sleep or wake it up. All other controls are through the Roland software running on the front end.
There’s no full width sheet-cutter built in, so you have to use a hand cutter after printing. If you stop and start the printer a lot it’s wasteful, as it advances about 11 cm of blank media when it starts a new job and this can’t be avoided even if you manually wind the media back. It’s more economical to build up a queue of jobs and print the lot in one run, with no gaps.
Removing and replacing media rolls is a lot easier than the huge and heavy rolls associated with wider inkjets, simply because they’re lighter and there’s less risk of stretching the vinyl. There’s no sheet feeder, so you have to guide sheets in manually through the back feed slot.
Front end
The Windows front end connects to the printer via USB. We ran a 5 metre USB cable the length of our office with no problem.
This is the main screen for the VersaWorks software, showing a job queue on the left and previews of the layouts on the right. In the centre is a preview of the currently selected file.
Roland’s own VersaWorks print management and RIP software is supplied as standard and is the same across the company’s range, with allowances for different printer capabilities via drivers. The RIP element uses Adobe PostScript 3 technology. VersaWorks is where you import job files, set up queues, and arrange them as a layout across the media width and length. There are controls for positioning, scaling, rotation, mirror-reversal and step & repeat for maximum media utilisation. Tiling can be set up to create overlapping prints that are larger than the printer’s area. Multiple files can be imported and arranged to print together, with automatic space-efficient layout.
When you’ve set up a layout you select a media profile, print quality (both resolution and number of passes) and mode (CMYK, white only, CMYK + white in our case). You can select a button to allow RIPping of the next job while printing. There are also controls for cutting (which may be print and cut or cut only), including varying the cutting force for different materials. VersaWorks has provision for variable data, with a menu section for importing this and defining fields.
After the layout section you hit the RIP button and wait for the job to be processed. Usefully at this stage VersaWorks shows a prediction of ink consumption, which is handy for costing. After that the job can be saved automatically for recall and output without re-RIPping. Finally you hit the print button and the job is sent to the printer.
A client program is supplied so Mac users can access VersaWorks over a network, though this won’t yet run on the latest Mountain Lion operating system.
The separate BN-20 Utility software lets you monitor ink levels and set up test prints and cleaning routines. To clean the printer, needed about once per week depending on use, a command from the BN-20 Utility parks the heads after which you get at the caps by opening the front glass panel. One of the benefits of light solvent printers is that daily cleaning isn’t necessary. The BN-20 Utility can also be used to run a nozzle check print, clean the nozzles, adjust the bi-directional register, and run cut and print/cut alignment checks.
Artwork creation
Corel Draw design software is widely used for sign and display design work, though it’s Windows only. An alternative is Adobe Illustrator, which runs on Macs as well as Windows. Both programs can create the layers and spot colours needed to set up the fifth colour and vector cutting paths for the BN-20.
Here’s our Welsh dragon sticker being set up in Illustrator CS6. The main green artwork has been given a thick outline stroke to ensure it bleeds properly during cutting. The outline has also been copied and pasted into the separate Cut layer and given a 0.25 point outline with the special spot colour name ‘CutContour.’ This cutting path is visible here as the magenta inner line.
The BN-20 is also supplied with R-Works, a basic Windows based design program that can be used to create new jobs, but seems more likely to be used for last minute modification of imported files where the cut lines or spot colours aren’t working. You might also use other layout programs such as QuarkXPress or InDesign, and export them as EPS or PDF format.
Roland supplies colour swatch palettes for all the popular graphics programs, including the ancient FreeHand and PageMaker. These include Roland’s own colour library plus pre-set spot colours with the correct names for triggering the white, metallic and cut path runs, as well as a palette of metallic colours for the silver ink.
The setting for the cutting path is quite critical. It needs to be a vector outline with
a specific stroke width (0.25 pt) and a specially named spot colour (default
is ‘CutContour’). You need to create separate layers for CMYK, white/silver and the cutting path. The layers can set ithe order the special inks are printed in, though you can override this in VersaWorks.
Transparency in the artwork can disable CutContour, so it’s best to pre-flatten this in Illustrator. We found that masks in Illustrator also disabled the cut line.
It’s evident that setting up the artwork correctly is critical, so you’re going to need an experienced Illustrator or Corel user in the loop somewhere.
We requested the white ink configuration rather than metallic, to experiment with
window graphics on clear static cling media. Normally you’d print white first, with CMYK on top, so the coloured print touches the glass and the white goes behind it as a highlighter. Alternative, for backlit graphics to go behind glass, the CMYK is printed first and white last. VersaWorks lets you set up double or triple hits for the white to increase its opacity if needed.
With one of our Digital Printer window graphics the whole image had a white background, which refused to stick to glass at all. So a large unprinted clear border was added, increasing the size of the sticker. An alternative was putting the print on the outside, but we found the white ink was easily damaged when smoothing the sticker onto glass.
We also achieved attractive results by printing stained glass graphics on cling media without a white backing.
Performance
How long the RIP stage takes depend on the job size and the power of your front end computer – ours was a fairly lowly Dell laptop so wouldn’t break any records.
Printing speeds are pretty slow, as Roland staff will admit: they’ve got faster machines in their range, such as the VersaCamm VS series in four widths from 30 to 64 inch widths, with the option of CMYK plus metallic and white in the same machines. However they cost more (£10,499 to £17,999) and take up more space.
The actual print speed is determined by the area you’re printing and the choice of of quality level: Normal, Draft, or Draft 2, as well as whether you’re printing the silver/white fifth colour. Normal means single-directional print and multiple overlapping passes, which gives very nice smooth halftones, tints and drop shadows.
Draft and Draft 2 use bidirectional print with fewer passes and are a lot faster. They are fine for solid colours (such as our dragon job), but you’d only use them for halftones and shadows if the job is intended only for viewing from a distance of a several feet. You may also need to select a pause for drying if you’re printing solid silver/white first and CMYK on top. You may sometimes need two or three passes to build up the density of the solid ink.
Here are the dragons after ‘weeding’ off the bleed surrounds. VersaWorks can
automatically generate an outer cut that you can strip off first, making it easier to peel off the actual label. This design is too delicate for practical label application, but we wanted to test a complex cut.
As a rough guide, our 16-up Welsh dragon job above, which was 440 mm wide x 150 mm long, took 15 minutes to print in Normal mode (though the Rip predicted only 10), 7 minutes in Draft (5 was predicted) and 4 minutes in Draft 2 (4 minutes predicted). There was no white pass. Our Digital Printer car window stickers in CMYK + white on clear static cling took much longer: 77 minutes in Normal mode to print and cut six of them across the full media width, measuring 200 mm along the length of media.
The cutting pass takes place after printing and also varies depending on the job content. A simple set of shapes (five 90 mm circles), took 1.5 minutes. Complex shapes take longer: our 16-up Welsh dragon job took 18 minutes to cut.
The alternative
Mimaki’s CJV30 series are printer-cutters equivalent to Roland VersaCAMMs that also offer light cyan and light magenta for smoother tones plus white and metallic, all in the same unit.
They can run eco-solvent, low solvent, or aqueous inks, though white and metallic are eco-solvent and low solvent only. The UK distributor, Hybrid Services, says most customers choose the SS21 low solvent inks, which adhere to more materials, dry faster and have a broader colour gamut.
The smallest model, the CJV30-60, the nearest equivalent to the Roland BN-20, with a 610 mm (24 inch) maximum media width. It’s physically significantly larger though, with a footprint of 1524 x 739 mm and it weighs 110 kg.
The Mimaki CJV30-60.
It’s also very much faster than the Roland. We haven’t been able to put a stopwatch on it, but Mimaki’s figures claim a nominal 18 m2 per hour, which is ten times that of the Roland (1.8 m2 nominal). Cutting is much faster too: Mimaki claims 45 cm per second, Roland claims 15 cm.
Hybrid Services has a special offer on the CJV30-60, for £5,995 including 3.5 litres of ink, until 28 September. This makes it a very keen competitor to the BN-20.
Contact: www.hybridservices.co.uk
Conclusion
VersaStudio BN-20 is a very compact, well built and keenly priced eco-solvent printer that would fit easily into an office or small studio environment. It can produce a wide range of jobs on all sorts of media, with its scope only really limited by its 20 inch media width. It’s a pity that Roland hasn’t managed to fit in a sixth ink channel so it could run metallic as well as white in the same unit.
On the other hand there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s very slow. Unless space is at a premium or you really can’t afford to pay more, we’d probably choose the larger, faster VersaCamm VS models from Roland, or look to the Mimaki CJV30 alternatives.
Having said that, we’ll be really sorry to see the user-friendly little BN-20 leave our office.
Contact: www.rolanddg.co.uk
