Question Banding, Only When Printing Black...

[Hector Diaz]

Hello friends...

I am using my Roland XR-640 eco-solvent printer to produce vehicle graphics printed on Avery 1105 media. When I print full color we get excellent prints, but I am trying to print a black and white wrap and most of my prints are getting horrible banding, only in black. I am using Versa Works, Avery Profile, Density Controls color management. Some of these prints are nice and smooth, but most of them are very banded. Tried cleaning, tried messing with some of the temp controls, humidity controls in the room... everything else looks perfect, test prints, full color prints, they all look good... I've spent hundreds of dollars on media already and tried everything that came to mind. This banding is not even the type of banding I am used to, it looks more like a skid mark. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

 

[WYLDGFI]

A pic would help. Try adding in a little CMY to your B&W prints. Could it be that your K head has some deviations you are not seeing and the interlace is creating the banding that way? Are you limiting ONLY to K for those B&W prints?

 

[Hector Diaz]

A pic would help. Try adding in a little CMY to your B&W prints. Could it be that your K head has some deviations you are not seeing and the interlace is creating the banding that way? Are you limiting ONLY to K for those B&W prints?

Thanks for the feedback! Here's a pic of one of the bad prints we did this morning. We are using only black/grayscale with density control color management in versa works. I would mess with the files, but we are half way done with the printing, first half look great, and like I said, we switched to a full color project and it looks fine, we are only having this issue with the black at the moment.

 

[Jim Hancock]

What media setting are you using in Versaworks, i.e., resolution, passes, etc.? If you could post a screen shot of the quality settings tab for the B&W job you are printing, that would be very helpful. The XR series printers seem to have issues printing large solid blocks of color and if you are forcing the software to just use black only, that makes it worse, as normally you have 6 color channels doing the coverage and, if I am understanding what your settings are, you are trying to get 6 channels of coverage with 1 color channel. Wyld Bill is pointing you in the right direction, in that you probably need to be printing a "rich" black, which is black with CMY components added to the mix. Can you also post a pic of the file you are trying to print?

 

[Hector Diaz]

What media setting are you using in Versaworks, i.e., resolution, passes, etc.? If you could post a screen shot of the quality settings tab for the B&W job you are printing, that would be very helpful. The XR series printers seem to have issues printing large solid blocks of color and if you are forcing the software to just use black only, that makes it worse, as normally you have 6 color channels doing the coverage and, if I am understanding what your settings are, you are trying to get 6 channels of coverage with 1 color channel. Wyld Bill is pointing you in the right direction, in that you probably need to be printing a "rich" black, which is black with CMY components added to the mix. Can you also post a pic of the file you are trying to print?

Thank you Jim, here are some screen shots. We are using Density Control for color management, and default media settings for heater controls (we tried bringing down the temp and it look good at first then at the end it started the banding again), printing bi-directional, unidirectional didn't help either...

 

[Jim Hancock]

OK, this gives me some info. Can you post a pic of this tab in Versaworks. See the attached pic. Also, I would like to see a pic of the nozzle test print and the edges of the fill test in service mode. These pics will help me start narrowing down what the problem is. It may sound strange, but printing B&W on sign printers often works better when printing in color with a media profile that has a good gray balance.

 

[Caw]

I have 2 of these printers and as dumb as it sounds, Sometimes you need to change the black cartridge to a brand new one if one color is having problems...obviously only if you use cartridges but this usually works my banding issue right out if it's not the cap. You could have a bad cap too. Luckily it's pretty easy to change a cap and get parts.

 

[karst41]

A few things I learned from owning Seiko CP 64's and HP 9000's.
Also on my second HP Latex.

Bandededed ing is most often Print Head clogged nozzles.
I like the 1/4" foam tip sponges with a wiper fluid or a storage fluid and scrubb the wee wee out of it and then
follow up with a strong cleaning cycle.

DO NOT FOLLOW these STEPS for other than Seiko or HP Solvent (Antiquated Printers)
How ever you can try this. Do a total shut down of the printer. If print head has dedicated ribbon cable
Unseat the ribbon cable. Power on. You will get a WTF %$#^!! error code of some sort.
Totally Shut down, the reseat the ribbon cable and power that bad boy up.

Run one more cleaning cycle.

You either have a bad print head,,,,,,imagine that or some other technical issue in the daughter board
if the printer has one.

Call someone who sells your printer and schedule a service call.
A $400 service call is much cheaper than a new printer,,,,IF you can get somebody to actually come.


AVERY? These jokers are Kings of quality control of print media.
I banned Avery from my shop 20 years ago.

Another thing I always hear is that people love matte film because it prints better.
Matte film hides banding better.

With HP Latex pretty much everything is $135
PH $135, 750 ml Ink $135 Maint Cartridge is the capping station and wiper station combines
Those are $145.
Down Fall is a Print head only last 6-10 liters of ink. Sometimes even more.
They are easy as pie to clean and reseat, because the printer does the alignment automatically.

HP 560 is only good for full roll runs. You lose 2' of out feed on every one off job.
But if you are doing a full wrap on 53' trailers and dropping 53" sheets then the 560 and 570 is really freaking good.

Sorry for the long rant and ramble, and I hope it helps somebody out there.

Cheers

 

[Jim Hancock]

DO NOT FOLLOW these STEPS for other than Seiko or HP Solvent (Antiquated Printers)
How ever you can try this. Do a total shut down of the printer. If print head has dedicated ribbon cable
Unseat the ribbon cable. Power on. You will get a WTF %$#^!! error code of some sort.
Totally Shut down, the reseat the ribbon cable and power that bad boy up.

I'm not sure if you are referring to Seiko and HP solvent printers with this suggestion of unplugging cables or if your referring to other brands of printers. I would have to ask what that is supposed to accomplish, if you could explain. Powering on a printer with ribbons unplugged should only be done by a technician who knows what he is doing and only as a troubleshooting technique...

 

[WYLDGFI]

Hector...were you able to make any headway on your printing issue?

 

[Hector Diaz]

Thank you all for your comments. I ended up going to the dealer to print the graphics using their brand new machine and still got the same issue (but not nearly as bad). My guess is that it has something to do with the "Density Controls Only" setting or the file itself?

 

[Hector Diaz]

Hector...were you able to make any headway on your printing issue?

Hey Bill! Thanks so much for checking in. I posted my solution in the thread.

 

[P Wagner]

Thank you all for your comments. I ended up going to the dealer to print the graphics using their brand new machine and still got the same issue (but not nearly as bad). My guess is that it has something to do with the "Density Controls Only" setting or the file itself?

Was this your 'solution'?

By choosing Density Control as your color management preset, you are disabling color management, including all ICC profiles. The only reason that I can think that would be a good idea is when the current machine state is significantly misaligned with the settings (linearization and ICC) in the media preset. Relinearizing or creating a completely new custom print mode based on your machine's state would be a much better (higher image quality) alternative to disabling color management entirely.

 

[Hector Diaz]

Was this your 'solution'?

By choosing Density Control as your color management preset, you are disabling color management, including all ICC profiles. The only reason that I can think that would be a good idea is when the current machine state is significantly misaligned with the settings (linearization and ICC) in the media preset. Relinearizing or creating a completely new custom print mode based on your machine's state would be a much better (higher image quality) alternative to disabling color management entirely.

I know. We are operating older equipment and limited resources (no equipment to create our own profiles). One of our techs recommended using "Density Control" and grayscale in order to get rich black, all our other combinations result in redish greys/blacks. Thank you!

 

[Bly]

If you're only using black ink this is what happens. Thin bandy output.
Print b/w using 4 colour with a good profile and you'll get nice rich blacks.

 

[karst41]

I'm not sure if you are referring to Seiko and HP solvent printers with this suggestion of unplugging cables or if your referring to other brands of printers. I would have to ask what that is supposed to accomplish, if you could explain. Powering on a printer with ribbons unplugged should only be done by a technician who knows what he is doing and only as a troubleshooting technique...

Yes these were solvent machines and I have totally rebuilt these printers.

Believe it or not ribbon cables if the printer employees them are near the top of the usual suspects list.
Also why I encourage a service call.

With the HP Latex printers you go to the printer menu and go to the change printhead.
There you remove the print head and clean the contacts on the carriage and the PH.

Another note especially on the Latex PHs. When they go bad it can cause all kinds of issues
that are Fake or False. You may think a pump has gone bad. The counter is running and cycles on the pump
line pressure shuts it off. Your printer is making noise and your are now terror stricken over a $135 PH.

Enough to make you Bat Poo Crazy.

 

[Jim Hancock]

Thanks for the explanation. Agree, ribbons are the first thing to check. Just leery when the customer starts messing with them.
As far as misleading errors go, I used to take care of 5 M&R iScreen direct to screen printers, which were using an Epson 9880 re-assembled onto a frame for silk screen printing, as opposed to using to using film for imaging the screen. The ink would eventually coat the encoder strip and cause the machine to error out. The error code suggested changing the mainboard, when a $50 encoder strip fixed the issue. Encoder strips became a consumable item for those machines. That ink is the only ink I have never been able to remove from an encoder strip.