having a weird issue that i thought would eventually clear up - basically, i am getting weird "spots" on my prints, esp with gloss vinyl, although it shows up in other materials also. this is not a media issue, i have it on whatever i try. isnt as noticable on paper or banner, as they are more pourous, but on glossy vinyl, they are terrible. these look almost like ache spots that will appear small and are white, as if the ink drop is not setting on that pass. hard to describe, wish i could post a pic. again, NOT a media issue - i've spent 2 weeks with various brands and it happens regardless
anyone had similiar issues? - i would think maybe defective ink, but it will appear in the daily print test blocks on either cyan or light magenta.
of course, i've called tech, but they have no idea.
well, after a lot of testing and head scratching, i found out the problem would go away when running on 8-pass HQ mode - i usually run most of my vinyl in standard, as they come out so well (after getting the feed settings on the money) and its lots faster - so, at least i can work around the issue.
i did take your recommendation and bump the heat slightly, i never have messed with the heat settings before.
What are you running at right now. Differences in heat will really change the color of your prints. The correct setting will also make your colors look better and hard edges look more crisp. Higher heats will open the vinyl up to accept ink better. Go too far though and material can start to buckle. I've found that settings of 45/40/45 tend to work well for most vinyls. Banners and other specialty films require slightly different settings.
just for experiment, i bumped the heat up to 50/45/50 - usually, i run at 45/40/45 prints came out great - i just dont normally run HQ - i'm not one of those that is comfortable enough to run the thing when no-one is here to check on it - i had heard that a higher setting and HQ mode would dry some ink heads up as they passed over the center heater - say if you have a lot of one color coverage and some heads arent firing
I hear you about running unattended. A couple weeks ago I ran a rush job overnight. When I came in the next morning I found 50ft of material laying on the floor. The take up reel had stopped winding in the middle of the night.
When the Seiko rep was here, he said that as long as you ran the colorstripe there shouldn't be any issues with long runs of one color. He said that the stripe was enough to keep the heads moist. But who knows, I have seen it where I check on a long run and you can see that certain colors started to dry up a little.
my biggest fear in the unattended printing is what happens when something jams up and the heads sit all night outside of the capping station and dry out - that would be a PITA to get them firing 100% again.
btw, thanks for the help - i'm getting decent prints now, but i still need to have a tech come out (since i just dropped $5K for the 2nd year full svc warranty)
I'm glad it worked out for you. I am a little suprised though. Whenever you get spots like that ("fish eyes"), it tends to mean that there is too much ink being put down for the material. It could be a variety of reasons, like the heat settings being too low or the profile being a bit off for the material. I don't know what RIP or material you are using, but I've found that most of the out of the box profiles tend to be a bit heavy handed. If you run into the problem again maybe try to create a new profile or just bump your ink restrictions back a little.
Spots & mottling on glossy vinyl media can be cause from a wide variety of things. The most common being...fingerprints (oil from your hands will cause blotches on the print because the ink will not adhere correctly) Dirt, and unfortunately too often lately...bad lots from the manufacturer....we have sent back about 11 MPI1005 EZ rolls, and about 5 3M ControlTac rolls...what a PITA. Just keep a print log of all your materials and what got printed on it because a few months down the road, you may get a call from your client telling you that there are blotches in the prints where the ink never really got into the pores an now there are light spots on the material. If you have print logs of this and what batch/lot # the material came from they can usually help you out with come of the costs incurred (especially if you have the ICS Fleet Warranty)
Palindrome wrote: I'm glad it worked out for you. I am a little suprised though. Whenever you get spots like that ("fish eyes"), it tends to mean that there is too much ink being put down for the material. It could be a variety of reasons, like the heat settings being too low or the profile being a bit off for the material. I don't know what RIP or material you are using, but I've found that most of the out of the box profiles tend to be a bit heavy handed. If you run into the problem again maybe try to create a new profile or just bump your ink restrictions back a little.
Yeah, the profiles from PhotoPrint for example are indeed "heavyhanded", whereas profiles from Caldera are just plain funking amazing. Lots of savings there folks, think about it. I'm not endorsed by that, but i just know the difference personally, as i ran one machine on Caldera and one on Photoprint and then decided it's just not worth it. Switched both to Caldera.
I really wish we had a machine to run Caldera on, just to try it out. I like PosterShop all right, but Caldera looks like it has some nice features. What platform do you run on Joshie? I'm guessing it's a Mac, but what is the setup? This would be ideal for me because I work at a smaller shop and handle all the pre-press duties as well as running all the printers. I tend to have some problems with certain files on the PCs that work fine on the Mac. I think the Macs are more stable overall.
As for profiles, it really is worthwhile to make your own. When I run materials that I have created the profiles for the print quality is much nicer, not to mention I don't have to worry as much about drying issues.
Palindrome wrote: I really wish we had a machine to run Caldera on, just to try it out. I like PosterShop all right, but Caldera looks like it has some nice features. What platform do you run on Joshie? I'm guessing it's a Mac, but what is the setup? This would be ideal for me because I work at a smaller shop and handle all the pre-press duties as well as running all the printers. I tend to have some problems with certain files on the PCs that work fine on the Mac. I think the Macs are more stable overall. As for profiles, it really is worthwhile to make your own. When I run materials that I have created the profiles for the print quality is much nicer, not to mention I don't have to worry as much about drying issues.
Geez... Mac? God forbid. Yikes. Even the name Mac scares me. No way man. This is eastern europe, we don't bother with trendy junk like Macs ;) No offense mate, really. I will never say that Macs are more stable, because i don't need "more stable" - my PCs work flawlessly stable all the time. And they're much cheaper. And i never had any file that didn't work on a PC :)
Obviously, our Caldera works on a PC running Linux. But, i did not hear about much trouble with Macs. Obviously again, you should not RIP on the same PC or Mac that you work on. It's strictly and highly unadvisable.
Caldera is weird on the outside, but works flawlessly on the inside. Once you learn it (it's weird but not difficult) you will work very smoothly. I can't say i like it more than PhotoPrint for example, because PhotoPrint is so intuitive and fun, but once your files are ok, Caldera is more smooth. Plus really, honestly, it provides you with very good looking files, but at the same time, due to some secret optimization algorithms, it saves up on ink.
No offense taken. The way our shop operates, flexibility is a must, so a dedicated RIP platform is out of the question. Besides, running Linux on a PC isn't so much different from running a Mac as both operating systems are based on Unix code. The differences between Macs and PCs gets smaller every year, especialy since Apple switched to using Intel chips recently. All that is really left is the operating systems. I have never worked on a Linux machine, but it would be interesting to try out. From what I hear it is supposed to be a very stable system.
I think that setting up a very simple Intel P4 based platform on Linux, running Caldera is not a bad idea, nor is it an expensive one. You don't need much processing power there, and running a rip job on a computer that runs also Photoshop and Illustrator and email and internet is bound to cause trouble. And there is no problem with setting up networking to work well under Linux so the flow of data is really fast. The only thing i have to do now at our facility is to switch from 100MBit to Gigabit LAN. There is more and more stuff and the files are big... We have 5 design/prepress computers and 4 rip computers. So yeah, the scale is a bit bigger there (but we do prepress also for screen printing, so that's split somewhere in the middle, still).
The good thing about Linux is that yes, it is very stable, but also it is extremely safe. It's easier to configure it for safety than Windows. Dunno about Mac OS X. My employees were able to crack our safety system under Windows XP and installed a lot of cr4p on the machine which slowed it down and caused PhotoPrint files to get damaged. Well, under Linux they just have to work. We didn't even enable them to play Solitaire ;)
On the other hand on windows we do run software that tells us who works and who doesn't. It even calculates how long you spent surfing the net instead of photoshopping or even how many clicks you've done with your mouse ;) Although i don't live in the US, i take a wild guess that all WalMart computers are fitted with such circuitry which sends data to the government about anyone who opposes war and Bush's rule ;) hahaha...
I guess we driven far apart from the "SPOTS" topic :)
