This family of three wide-format inkjet printers are the latest in Roland VS's family of combined printer-cutters. These are the 64in (1,625mm) VS-640i, the 54in (1,371mm) VS-540i, and the 30in (762mm) VS-300i. this family aimed at the sign-making, commercial print, photographic and packaging design sectors. How do they work? The configuration is fairly conventional, with a travelling carriage containing both the inkjet printheads and the cutting knife for the contour cutter. The printheads (made by Epson) are piezo greyscale drop-on-demand, with 1,440dpi resolution and seven droplet sizes. Cutting lines can be set up within the main artwork file using standard vector software such as Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, using a special colour name that’s detected by the VersaWorks RIP. Registration spots are printed automatically. If cutting’s required, after the main print run the media is rolled back and the cutting pass is run, with a detector on the head aligning it to the registration marks. Alternatively, the roll can be cut off after printing so the resulting sheet can be laminated then fed back into the printer for a separate contour cutting pass. How do they differ from previous models? There are general improvements in speed and performance to the family’s versatile general-purpose inkjet predecessors. The ink cartridges are now front loading. Cut settings can now be adjusted on the fly during long jobs. The Eco-Sol Max2 ink is new as is a choice of five colour configurations. The inks are CMYK, light cyan, light magenta, light black, white and metallic silver. The light black is new to the range and helps tonal reproduction in black and white photographs. The white and silver inks are a higher density than their predecessors, so white can be printed one-and-a-half times faster and silver twice as fast.