My Seiko 64 was great when I got it a month ago. After printing 250 meters, I started getting banding problem.
The technician changed a defective Cyan head and the banding went away for a day. Now I've got pinstripe banding.
I've tried adjusting feed and printing on different media and I still get thin dark lines. I have done several strong cleans and cap fills to no effect. The technician did a nozzle printout and all heads look fine. Help, does anyone know what the problem may be?
I adjusted feed on the fly. I tried adjusting from 100.00 to 100.55. At the higher feed setting, I was starting to get a fuzzy white line next to a fuzzy dark line. The thin dark lines also appear on 8 pass mode.
The technician took some samples of my print on different media with him to think it over.
By the way, I said that after the tech changed the cyan head I didn't get banding for a day. Actually, I only did 2 prints on paper for that day. Next day, I started getting the thin dark lines.
It's one of the most consistent things with the machine. It doesn't matter if it's 4 pass or 8 pass. As a matter of fact, I did a test print of the 6 colors and all of the colors have dark lines running through. So it's not just one color. But the nozzle test print shows that there is no misfiring nozzle. I also tried printing with different head heights. What's happening?
The humidity in my shop is 30%. I doubt this has anything to do with it.
The humidity seems fine. If you did experiment with feed and it did not give good results, then it's weird. GIve us your temperature settings please. The higher the setting, the quicker the ink dries and the less "dark" banding you have. Of course that's not a good solution, but it is some solution anyway :)
So, summing up, let us know about: - type of media - temperature setting - tension or slack winding/unwinding? - media pressure lever up or down? - RIP type, just for curiosity
If it is not a clogged nozzle and changing the feed adjust has no effect, to me it seems like a profiling issue. Too much ink maybe? I agree that cranking the heat may be a quick fix, but not best one. Is this problem occuring on all medias or just some?
Heat setting : 45 40 45 for paper media Pressure lever : up (normal) Takeup : slack wind Media : paper, vinyl Rip : Production House 6.5 with revision 2 update
The problem has occurred in the two medias I've tried: paper and 13 oz vinyl banner. The paper profile is home made using Onyx Profile Manager and an Eye-one reader and I used Saturn 12 oz profile for my banner material.
The technician told me he thinks that the thin dark line may be a media problem.
I tried a different media supplier yesterday and (like wow) the problem is gone. I'm still baffled by why my previous media worked well for a while. Was it because there quality control went bad or was there some factor that I changed in the machine. I'll try to do some controlled tests with the previous media to find out.
My banding is back. It's on the media that worked well for a while. This time the banding looks different. It's got faint white stripes. The tech said the head needed adjustment and loosenned and adjusted the head carriage. The banding did not go away. Nozzle pattern print did not show any missing jet. After trying to adjust the feed without success, the tech thinks something may be wrong with the feed adjust system. He's reviewing it with his boss and coming back next week. I hope I'm not getting stuck with a recurring problem with this machine.
It's very likely caused by a combination of media, the nature of a specific image file and the profile used in the rip. I use Onyx Production House v6.5 with Profile Manager. I did the profiling for the different media I used and even used the media manufacturer's profile without success. I may need to tweak the profiles but I can't seem to find enough info on the relationship of various factors in Onyx's Profiling software (difficult to use). Maybe someone has access to a guide or website that better explains it.
We print on a lot of 3m control-tac vinyl and have a lot of challenges w/ banding- we get a dark line next to a white one (or dark one) depending on where the stepping is set. It's hard to adjust stepping when you have both a dark AND white line. It's just very inconsistent and hard to nail down when it happens and why. All nozzles firing and H-adj looks perfect. Our temperature settings are the same as yours and we've played with them (increasing and lowering) without any measurabe success.
Seems like your rollers might be dirty, or the media is just to slippery for the whole system. I hope you tried to increase the force of rollers (that roller pressure lever), but my other recommendation would be to just unwind the material from the source roll manually, so that the machine doesn't have to pull it out from the roll - just make it hang loosely there. See if it makes any difference - according to my pov, it should. Good luck.
Joshie, it does hang loosely and I *think* when the Seiko tech was here last he did increase the pinch roller tension. I just called Seiko and they asked me to try it in 8-pass. I thought for sure I would see the same banding just much more narrow- but that was not the case- it looked pretty much perfect. Not sure why 4-pass is off so much. It's like a dark line next to either a darker line or white space depending on where the stepping is set- but there is always a darker line at the edge of the pass...
Oh... so is banding different on the left side and on the right side of the printout? My Seiko came with a crooked media unwind section. This has caused a lot of trouble when the media was not loosely going from the roll into the machine. It was easily fixed (unscrew some screws, correct, screw back) but until i found out about it (from this forum, btw) i thought that Seiko sucks. So far i have no banding problems on any media, in 4 pass, if only the media hangs loosely (that's important in case of banners or other heavy materials) and the temperature is set high enough (dark banding sometimes is caused by subsequent passes flowing into each other, so it can be diminished by setting the temperature high enough).
However, if your Seiko is already approx 1 yr old, then it can be already strained mechanically. Our service guy told us, that soon we're gonna need a replacement of the whole roller section (bottom and top) cuz it's already highly strained (over 16000 running meters printed).
I've had some banding problems as well. Went through most of the things listed here trying to fix. Feed adjust just didn't seem to do a thing in either direction to help. Neither did anything else.The last couple of days, signlab has asked me to help them test some new profiles and Daniel, their tech, had me up the max ink output to get rid of the banding. Did a feed adjust after, no more banding. Prints look better than when the machine was brand new. I can't say enough good about Signlab. They have been there to help when Seiko would not and have been infinitely more competent.
Just to edit my message above- not sure while there is an emoticon- it should say "eight pass". The banding however is not different from side to side. The media loads straight as far as I could tell. We were having some problems with lighter and darker bands depending on which side of the media you viewed. The tech adjusted that previously and now it's just consistent banding across the whole piece. Maybe I could try a different profile. Anyone have a 3m control tac 180c profile that works well? We downloaded one from 3m's website just the other day, but the same results. I'm surprised that adding more ink helped the problem- it seems like that would make it worse, but I'll give that a try. It looks pretty saturated as is. We use a light weight cardboard core on the media side to keep slack so the electric eye see's the media. We do not use anything on the takeup side- just loose slack.
michaeld wrote:We were having some problems with lighter and darker bands depending on which side of the media you viewed.
i don't really get this sentence, can you explain that to me? i can understand it in three ways, but i don't think either is right:
1) banding differing from the left edge to the right (light line on the left, going into no banding in the center, to a dark line on the right) - meaning a media skew or one side is more difficult to takeup than the other
2) banding oscillating from light to dark, which can indicate off-centre shafts or some general irregularities in media takeup
3) banding differing on one side of the banner and the other, that can be due to the fact that banners that are not suited for double sided printing, or ones that have already been printed on with a lot of ink, can have different surface properties, so it requires different force to transport it through the system.
4) yeah, now i came up with a fourth one - alternating darker and brighter lines can be due to wrong vertical head alignment, but in case of Seiko it is not possible rather, as there is only one head per colour.
so, what's the problem? any scans maybe? let us know of the temperature too.
Joshie, thanks for the response. The part of the sentence most important is "we were". Since Seiko came out and adjusted the machine we no longer get banding going from light to dark- it was because of a media skew. That has been fixed as far as I can tell. Now, in 4-pass, we get banding no matter what stepping we try. We see a dark line all the time. When we increase the stepping it starts to show white, but the darker line is always there. When running in 8-pass it looks great... the temps are 40, 45, 40 for the 3m material- we played with the heat a little bit, but didn't notice any improvement. Humidity is 50% and the shop temperature is about 80 deg. All jets are firing and the h-adj looks perfect. Maybe it's a head alignment issue? Is there a way for a user to run the patterns that the tech uses to verify it's adjusted correctly? Thanks for any insight all.
To me it seems like you're laying down too much ink. We use a lot of 3M 180 at our shop and we also use the "canned" profile that you can download off the website. I've always thought that profile uses too much ink. Your best option would be to profile the media yourself, but if that isn't an option try to back off your ink restrictions a little bit. Nothing too drastic, just experiment a little bit.
Yeah, when there always is a dark line even with high stepping, then surely something's either wrong with the material itself or too much ink. The truth is, i use Caldera rip with my Seiko & Oce combo and i have never had any problems with too much ink. I think that by default, Caldera sets the ink limits and profiles to be use as little ink as it is reasonable for the quality of the printout. That, i think, is not the case with other software. I have tried running my Seiko using PhotoPrint, i have made profiles myself too, and only one word comes to my mind - flood! The ink overflow was disastrous, especially in dark tones. And i swear i was setting the initial ink limits very reasonably.
One more thing Michael - if you run your your vinyl on 40-45-40, i think it's much better to run 45-40-45. But honestly, if you're running in 4pass, you can set 45-40-55. But the thing is, that the temperatures that are used normally for 4pass are too high for 8 pass. That might be the reason why, without changing the temperature, the look of the printout in 8 pass is better than in 4 pass.
One last thing - i guess that's the market difference - but why are you printing on 3M? Aren't there any cheaper, but equally good alternatives? :)
gutted i misssed out on this one!! we've seen the same problem very early on and as joshie says it's probably down to media misfeed from the roll or through the pinch rollers. the easiest way around this is to use md5 (i know it's not cheap) but it's what seiko use to test so you are on the same playing field. cut a sheet and try this. if the banding goes then it's a media feed alignment issue. if not then look at the rollers.
remember the banding can be very subjective but white and black lines definately mean mis-load or mis-feed.
.........the first seiko i had...........(2nd one in service in florida)...........ran for 3 months before i started to have banding problems..............
.......after heads replaced, mech. adjust, and yards of material wasted..........seiko agreed to replace the machine.............
the problem seiko was sent back to california and eventually was fixed and resold...........
.........the problem was that the y-axis servo motor was misstepping due to worn sprocket teeth...............
and i heard months later that other machines endured the same problem and were fixed the same way.............
bingo....i've spoken to the seiko rep about such a problem, because our unit had a stepping issue which showed itself to be the same cog. when it was removed you could see that the teeth were really badly worn and it seemed that the cog material was too soft for the application is was required to do.
i've heard nothing more about this so i doubt seiko have done anything about it.
Thanks all. I'm going to try running with less ink in 4-pass and see if it improves. Other media in 4-pass looks fine, so I have to assume it's a media/profile issue... What is "md5"?
md5 is a metamark sav that is a slightly expensive but very good substrate. i thingk seiko use this when they do all their testing. well worth the outlay, as it gives really good colour and is very vibrant. sometimes you do get what you pay for!!
Well 3M control tac isn't exactly cheap- but I did have a major improvement when I set the head height to the low position. We had been running everything with the high head height setting- once it was lowered the dark band that would not disappear with stepping adjustment went away. Hopefully this will help others who experience a similar problem. We now alter the head height for banner and thicker materials and keep it low when running adhesive vinyl.
Thanks for sharing your experience Scheid. I've been printing in 8 pass for all substrates since I couldn't get the Seiko tech to fix the black / white line banding when I print in 4 pass. I've tried tweaking temperature, roller pressure, head height, different profiling and changing media. Time to get some answers from Seiko.
