cutting reflective?????

[laserman70]

We bought the summa s160
Works great very accurate..

Cannot read anything when on reflective..
oracal reflective with 210 lam...

Any ideas or tricks out there?

 

[J Hill Designs]

cover marks with scotch tape? redraw marks on white vinyl and overlay?

 

[WI]

Not sure about a Summa, but for a whole lot of other devices with optical sensors, if you put a piece of Scotch tape over each of your registration marks, the eye can pick them up. Oftentimes it's the shinyness of a material that'll throw the sensor.

 

[Jim Doggett]

We bought the summa s160
Works great very accurate..

Cannot read anything when on reflective..
oracal reflective with 210 lam...

Any ideas or tricks out there?

Print OPOS marks at the center of 3-inch square pieces of white vinyl, and place that over the printed marks on your reflective.

 

[Jim Doggett]

Not sure about a Summa, but for a whole lot of other devices with optical sensors, if you put a piece of Scotch tape over each of your registration marks, the eye can pick them up. Oftentimes it's the shinyness of a material that'll throw the sensor.

Precisely. The reflective disperses the light in all directions, defeating the sensor.

Another way is to cut squares of white vinyl, with a cutout the size of the OPOS mark (typically 3mm square) in the middle, and lay that over the top, leaving the mark exposed through the cutout.

What the OPOS sensor looks for is a high degree of color differential when scanning around the area in which the marks should be, based on manually steering the sensor over the first mark, and then knowing to a relatively-high degree the distance (X or Y) to the other marks. And black/white is by far the best for OPOS to find them.

 

[laserman70]

Print OPOS marks at the center of 3-inch square pieces of white vinyl, and place that over the printed marks on your reflective.

i guess ill try that..
says on the site. reads marks on reflective ugh

 

[Jim Doggett]

i guess ill try that..
says on the site. reads marks on reflective ugh

Yes. See what your settings are for the size of your marks (default is 3mm square, I seem to recall) and print a bunch of them, spaced about 3 inches apart, on white vinyl. Then manually cut out the pieces, leaving some room for the sensor to scan around as it does. If it picks up anything during the scanning around phase, then it tries to find the mark based on it, such as a line of other element from the image. So some extra room is handy.

OPOS works by ...

1. Knowing roughly where the mark is.
2. Finding something that has a high degree of contrast (the mark).
3. Scans the mark, width and height directions.
4. Moves to the next mark, and so on
5. Cuts the images, and lastly all the marks, to show accuracy; if the mark is off slightly, then so to are the contours around images / labels. If off, doing an OPOS calibration is suggested.

 

[Jim Doggett]

i guess ill try that..
says on the site. reads marks on reflective ugh

Some reflectives, maybe. But that sounds like a bit of over-stating, which isn't needed with Summa's cutter marketing (scold them!!! , since they're the BEST, accuracy wise. And every sensor type system is problematic with reflectives, save that of the CCD camera sensors, like iCut, OptiSCOUT, etc.

 

[JBusch260]

Agreed with above advice. I've got a GraphTec that sometimes does the same thing. I thicken my registration marks and cover them with matte laminate (scotch tape works fine also)

 

[SightLine]

It works fine on reflective. There is a function in the menus that calibrates OPOS for a different media just for this sort of scenario. Read the manual though. I forget what the steps are. I do remember that you want to write down your old value and change it back. It is quick and easy to do though. Only takes a few seconds and you do it with the reflective loaded. It will have you move the pointer over a blank area first, then over a printed area (not a reg mark though, too small).