It's a JV33 clone from Alpha. Same DX5 head, but with a slightly different chassis. Panel inputs are all identical. Onyx thinks it's a JV33-160 and uses the Mimaki driver. Inks are unknown, bulk, dye sublimation. Definitely from Asia somewhere. No idea where. It's what they're using and I'm not asking them to change.
That printer is mounted to some heater unit that the fabric runs through to take care of the sublimation. It's direct to fabric, with no transfer paper (that would be too easy!).
Since the fabric can't be backed up and it takes about 10-15' for the material to go through the heater, we've been printing the patches and then using a T-shirt press to handle the phase change. Yeah, it's not optimal. I know that, so does he.
Frankly the whole set-up is kind of butchered together, but the client is a friend and we're just trying to a get a good single profile for him that will provide a decent base to work off of. So far the linearized machine with no profile, even with the inversion in the 3/4 tones. Is 10x better than what they were doing before. Grays are neutral, the colors pop.
So far I'm thinking of just going back to the legacy ink limits and setting up a custom program to read the calibration strips into a spreadsheet and averaging enough readings to cover any spikes coming from the texture of the fabric. I can force one of my profiling packages to handle the linearization and input the averaged numbers manually if that doesn't work. I'd prefer to have Onyx handle the ink limiting and linearization though. So they can bring the machine back to a baseline should it wander. Without having to redo the profile, or bring me back in just to re-linearize.
They're not interested in using Wasatch. They've got enough tied up in Onyx. I just need to figure out this different animal and get the linearization done correctly so I can profile the machine. I'd love it if they switched, because I'd be intimately familiar with the process using wasatch.
