The first contact was at the beginning of the year when XX Company (not mentioned in detail here) recommended low-price ink to customers, which was US$15/L. This price was really low and attractive, and the other party also said that if the quantity was large, they could continue to negotiate discounts. I didn’t pay attention at the time and gave up after saying a few perfunctory words. Last week I received a call from Mr. Li saying that the head was clogged and scrapped. It’s very strange. After all, the G5i head has only been used for a year. According to normal use, it still has a lifespan of at least 2 to 1 and a half years.
After checking the shelf life of the UV ink of the same batch and the daily maintenance form of the machine, it shows that the ink bags, ink tubes, and other ink circuit components are replaced every 6 months, and there will be no problems in these aspects. I also chatted with Xiao Zhang, the technician who operates the machine, about the usage in the past month.
His feedback was that the adhesion of the pattern was not as good as before, the smell was obviously stronger after printing, and the drying process was not thorough. The printed color, especially red, is not as good as before, and the frequency of ink pressing is much higher than before… I also checked the products made by the customer a few days ago, and it was indeed confirmed that the problem was with the UV ink.
At that time, I saw that the UV ink bottle was indeed packaged by our factory. I suspected that it was a factory problem, so I took a photo and sent it to the person in charge of the warehouse for verification. However, after inputting the system code there, it was found that there was no such code. They confirmed it three times and sent me screenshots to confirm that the UV ink was not issued from the factory.
I used this result to communicate with Mr. Li. He admitted that he bought 4 sets of UV ink from others a month ago. At that time, the salesperson of that company also promised that it was the original ink, but they had internal channels and the price was only Low, guaranteed not to cause problems. Later, I helped Mr. Li check the condition of the other four heads. Two were normal, and the other two had some heads blocked and the ink discharge was abnormal. I believe that if it were 10 days later, these two heads would be scrapped.
In the whole incident, Mr. Li seemed to have saved US$200 on consumables, but he paid 10 times the cost to replace the head. The gain was seriously outweighed by the loss. Thinking about this later, I rule out the customer’s own mentality of saving money and being greedy for cheap. However some companies in the industry that sell UV printers at low prices will use inferior UV ink to accelerate the damage to customers’ head parts to earn after-sales fees…
