Can Mimakis accurately set the origin/base point?

[White Haus]

Doing our first run of double sided banners on our newish UCJV. On the first side I just poked a hole on both starting corners so I know where to start the second side after rewinding and flipping the roll.

The issue I'm running into is that the origin point is not accurate. I'm assuming that the laser pointer indicates where the origin point should be?

I'll line up my mark from first side, set the laser pointer to that mark, and set origin. Sometimes it will print up to 1.5" off from where I set the origin point, sometimes about 1/4" off on both axis, sometimes bang on.

Am I missing something here or does this thing just not accurately keep track of the origin point?

 

[Print Master 03]

Mimaki cant find automatically corrent base point for havy materials or slippery (because your first side of materials with picture and for printer this slippery)/ You need solve this problem only hand prepare material and adjast position for start printing. After some time you learn to do it easy.

 

[White Haus]

Thanks. I was able to get it 95% accurate but still find it crazy that it will produce different results.

You would think a printer can accurately find a base point, but maybe I'm just spoiled with Rolands?

 

[Bingleardicus]

Mimaki cant find automatically corrent base point for havy materials or slippery (because your first side of materials with picture and for printer this slippery)/ You need solve this problem only hand prepare material and adjast position for start printing. After some time you learn to do it easy.

Also to this point it may be worth while to calibrate the feed for each side and assign this in the setup1,2,3, etc.

 

[iPrintStuff]

When we tried this on our Colorado we had to create a different profile for each side to account for the different thickness/texture etc. Luckily enough it prints bang in the middle every time so that does help lol

 

[White Haus]

It's not so much the calibration/feed/profile etc - it's just the fact that you can't accurately tell it where to start which is ridiculous.

The first time you set the laser, it will print about 1.5" inches away from that point. The following times, doing the EXACT same thing, it will print about 1/4" off on both axis.

I gave up trying to understand why it was off that much, just got it close enough and got the job done.

I just find that there are some serious oversights on this machine/firmware. Beast of a printer, but they should have spent less R&D on automatic pinch rollers and crap like that and spent more on common sense things that allow for more efficient production. Compared to our Roland, it takes about 4x the amount of time to load and set up a new roll. Lots of time waiting or "processing".
I guess I'm just impatient and secretly wishing we had a Colorado lol. Could have used one these past couple of weeks, even printing almost 2 full rolls a day on this thing we can't keep up.

 

[Print Master 03]

Roland is another machine and have another mechanice. You have both Roland and Mimaki on your manufacture?

 

[Print Master 03]

Thanks. I was able to get it 95% accurate but still find it crazy that it will produce different results.

You would think a printer can accurately find a base point, but maybe I'm just spoiled with Rolands?

Roland is another machine and have another mechanice. You have both Roland and Mimaki on your manufacture?

 

[Notarealsignguy]

Would it help if you select center to media in the rip?

 

[iPrintStuff]

Yeah. Pretty fortunate just now the Colorado works. Measures the width of the media and prints bang in the centre, and measures the leading edge before printing so always does exactly what you ask for.

Especially when it’s just a 1 off banner and you don’t need to chop the short edges because the Colorado has left the exact right amount for the hems!

As far as printing goes, we’d need 2 or three going full speed to keep up with this thing. Done about 80 rolls worth of Covid posters the last few weeks at about an hour a 42” roll (production quality) then countless floor vinyl rolls at about 2 hours a 54” 50m roll (high quality).

Not sure how this works on other machines but I do love the layout copies in onyx for the Colorado after you’ve hit “print now”. If I set up one sheet, then tell it I need 200 copies of that sheet, the Colorado counts them and I just need to keep putting rolls in. Is that a Colorado thing or an onyx thing?

 

[White Haus]

Yeah. Pretty fortunate just now the Colorado works. Measures the width of the media and prints bang in the centre, and measures the leading edge before printing so always does exactly what you ask for.

Especially when it’s just a 1 off banner and you don’t need to chop the short edges because the Colorado has left the exact right amount for the hems!

As far as printing goes, we’d need 2 or three going full speed to keep up with this thing. Done about 80 rolls worth of Covid posters the last few weeks at about an hour a 42” roll (production quality) then countless floor vinyl rolls at about 2 hours a 54” 50m roll (high quality).

Not sure how this works on other machines but I do love the layout copies in onyx for the Colorado after you’ve hit “print now”. If I set up one sheet, then tell it I need 200 copies of that sheet, the Colorado counts them and I just need to keep putting rolls in. Is that a Colorado thing or an onyx thing?

Man, now I'm really jealous!! I'm hoping this UCJV is just a baby-step towards eventually adding a Colorado. Need to add a flatbed cutter first though. That capacity sounds amazing, although I'm not so sure we could fill that pipe every day if it's that fast!

The layout copies are a Canon/Oce thing from what I've seen. We started running Onyx Thrive when we first got our Arizona, and got spoiled! I mean it was an "oce edition" of onyx so they obviously worked very closely together to develop it, but not a lot of those features have gone into running other printers like Rolands and Mimakis. The Mimaki drivers and profile settings are brutal - I'm really hoping onyx catches up because it's been an expensive and time consuming process. (Spent a whole day with a tech on site to create 1 profile that allows us to print cmyk+w out of onyx thanks to their half-a$$ drivers)

There is an other workaround that has been working great, creating custom sheet sizes in onyx. So I create a 115" x 54" "sheet" which is a good length for cutting accurately on our Summa after. I plug in 500 copies or whatever then it breaks it down to sheets, with barcodes for each "sheet" then they load up all nice in cut server. Just last night I sent down 8 hours worth of white prints from home, (thanks Teamviewer) come in this morning and it's ready for an other roll. Never been comfortable with Rolands to do that because the tracking was awful.

Anyways, that's an other rant. The printer itself is super solid and we're nearing the 20,000 sq ft mark already. (probably a week on a Colorado, but lots for us lol).

 

[White Haus]

Roland is another machine and have another mechanice. You have both Roland and Mimaki on your manufacture?

Yes we have both. I have 10+ years experience running Roland soljets and now learning the quirks of the Mimaki.

 

[White Haus]

Would it help if you select center to media in the rip?

You would think so.....! But when I flip the roll over (63" roll so I only wanted to do the dance once) it doesn't line up at exactly the same spot, so that was still off a little.

It was more the feed axis that was off/inconsistent. Really strange.

Oh well, got the banners done and packed up.

 

[iPrintStuff]

Yeah we got the canon/oce version of onyx too but got it upgraded to get the mimaki on there too, also it didn’t support ICC profile creation which was a PITA.

For the capacity, on the average day we were probably only using it 3-5 hours a day, just those three to five hours would’ve taken about 12-20 on our mimaki (running the mimaki as quick as I could without quality issues). But that has jumped up considerably since this Covid stuff started oddly enough. Probably running it about 8-12 hours a day now which would have been impossible with the mimaki lol.

Doubt we’ll be in the running for a flatbed cutter any time soon but that’s definitely on the bucket list. We recently bought a roll XY cutter and that’s been a complete life saver. Cut two rolls worth of signs down today alone. Probably about 12 mins a roll compared to a couple hours manually.

Would love a flatbed printer but it’d be 80% free stuff for me and 20% real jobs lol.

yeah I remember talking to you about the custom sheet size. Helped a load for me too! Nowadays when we’re doing vinyl labels I merge a sheet my desired finished sheet size in indesign (say 16” square as an example) put that into onyx with a custom sheet size (as you said, the largest we like to give the summa). Print the roll, lam the roll. Run it through the summa, then put that into the xy cutter and use the cutter to chop it into the 16” square sheets. Basically just need to move rolls around these days. No manual work for me!

Would love to be able to print white, we actually looked at your mimaki but ended up getting the printer that we could grow into instead of having to get a new printer quickly (we’d have had to buy another one already).

 

[Neil]

I'm assuming that the laser pointer indicates where the origin point should be?


Am I missing something here or does this thing just not accurately keep track of the origin point?

On my CJV30, the laser pointer is only used to read the reg marks for a print/cut job.
All it does is indicate how far away the reg mark is from the origin point.
So, you first set your origin on the machine, then you use the laser to set the amount of offset.

 

[Tipgypsy]

Doing our first run of double sided banners on our newish UCJV. On the first side I just poked a hole on both starting corners so I know where to start the second side after rewinding and flipping the roll.

The issue I'm running into is that the origin point is not accurate. I'm assuming that the laser pointer indicates where the origin point should be?

I'll line up my mark from first side, set the laser pointer to that mark, and set origin. Sometimes it will print up to 1.5" off from where I set the origin point, sometimes about 1/4" off on both axis, sometimes bang on.

Am I missing something here or does this thing just not accurately keep track of the origin point?

Make a simple black grid file with alignment marks and practice double sided prints until you can do it easily . There are things that you have to work out to get the best registration