Panels/tiles not lining up on 360 with Onyx 12

[Aklaim]

We printed quite a few wall wraps on Phototex, some which were very very very long... some of our tiles line up, but most of them don't. Each wall was its own individual file ripped by Onyx 12, with tiling enabled and a 1 inch overlap. As you can see in the photos, some are short, some just dont line up period, some line up and then start to drift over the length of the panel. There's just no rhyme or reason on why this is happening, at least not to me. We never had this issue on our L25500 with Onyx 10, so this is just odd.

 

[dypinc]

We printed quite a few wall wraps on Phototex, some which were very very very long... some of our tiles line up, but most of them don't. Each wall was its own individual file ripped by Onyx 12, with tiling enabled and a 1 inch overlap. As you can see in the photos, some are short, some just dont line up period, some line up and then start to drift over the length of the panel. There's just no rhyme or reason on why this is happening, at least not to me. We never had this issue on our L25500 with Onyx 10, so this is just odd.

Do you have OMAS enabled in your media setting on the printer?

 

[Aklaim]

Do you have OMAS enabled in your media setting on the printer?

Yes we do.

 

[dypinc]

I ran a bunch of Phototex about two weeks ago and had OMAS enabled. Only around 8' or so and the ones I tested were within a .25". If I remember on the L25500 I had better success with OMAS off. Might be worth a try on the L360. I believe that OMAS's job is to minimize banding and will try to control the feed to do that, so it could be different on different printers depending on clogged nozzles etc.

 

[Bly]

Yep turn off OMAS in the profile advanced settings on the printer.

 

[Aklaim]

Ok, I'll give that a shot, but that leads me to a second question, say I have 5 out of 6 panels that line up correctly, and I turn the OMAS off and reprint the 6th panel, would you think that it would line up with the previous 5 that I printed with OMAS on, or do you think I'm going to have to reprint the entire wall?

 

[dypinc]

Ok, I'll give that a shot, but that leads me to a second question, say I have 5 out of 6 panels that line up correctly, and I turn the OMAS off and reprint the 6th panel, would you think that it would line up with the previous 5 that I printed with OMAS on, or do you think I'm going to have to reprint the entire wall?

If does you're lucky. If it doesn't you just have to print the other panels. There is no way to know for sure short of printing the panel.

 

[TrustMoore_TN]

I had a project recently that did the same thing but it was printed on POS Pro 200 for panels for a popup display. None of the panels lined up, some were short and it drove me nuts. We were printing on a Mimaki JV33 with Rasterlink. I cornered a mimaki tech at SGIA and he was stumped also. I finally ended up getting orbus to print them even though it wasn't their frame. Afterward, I heard from a couple of different people that they have had the same problem and what corrected it was to flip every other panel 180 degrees and print them like that. A digital wallpaper installer told me that its common to do that with wallpaper so that the patterns line up better. I don't know the technical reason for it, and I have to say I haven't run another job that I needed to do this with. It's wierd because I can print 8 panel murals on vinyl with no issues.

Please keep us updated if you find a solution to this. Hope this helps.

 

[dypinc]

I would have thought that was common knowledge to flip every other panel of a tiled job, but that has to do with color matching, don't think it would have much effect on length though.

 

[Aklaim]

They were all printed with flipping every other panel.

 

[jawdavis]

I print murals, and only murals, mostly in multiple panels, all day long. We only print on Latex 360's and I can definitely say I've seen the same thing. Rotating your panels 180 degrees won't really help the overall length of a panel being short, but it certainly can help ease color shifts between panels and is good common practice in printing wallpaper. What I have found in the almost 2 years we've been running these machines is that they are WAY more sensitive to temperature/humidity fluctuations than the L25500's ever were. If you notice the amount of heat coming out of the front of the machine as opposed to the L25500, you'll realize that all of the drying and curing is happening outside of the platen towards the front of the machine and can be much more susceptible to drafts from doors opening/closing and other external factors than previous generations. All of the HP techs that have been here have said the exact same thing.

We used to have one of the 360's near an exterior door and one nice day the door was left open while printing. An 8' mural panel came out 1.5" short, and after the door was closed, the next panel came out 96" exactly. I'm no expert in thermodynamics, but I have many instances where external factors were wreaking havoc on these machines in a similar manner. Once we moved to a more isolated, controlled environment, this has dropped drastically, but without proper humidity control we still saw occasional issues.

Now for a while this issue coincided with the huge issues that HP was having with their firmware from about 6/15-12/15 but in the couple of months that we've been printing with new firmware in a better controlled environment, we have seen very few issues of panel length being different.

Also, we use Wasatch, not Onyx, but have seen this issue across RIP manufacturers.

 

[FrankW]

I work at an HP dealer, and we had a lot more problems with the length accuracy of Latex 260 and 280 than with the 300-series. With the 260 and 280 (26500 and 28500) it was a problem of the infrared temperature sensor, and how it works on uni- or multicolor surfaces.

On the Latex 360, HP have recognized a problem with the take-up-roller. After a customer had complains about that, I have tested it with printing long tiles without it, and it works with my application. HP have created a counterweight kit what reduces the strength of the dancer roller, could help in your case too.

 

[larkinja]

Did you ever figure out a solution to this problem. We have been having this same problem with a 370 for the last year at least. No rhyme or reason at all. Sometimes they line up, but more often than not they are off around .25" . Yesterday we had one that was a full inch off. Makes no sense. We are running Flexi Cloud. We have tried pre-tiling them in Photoshop. We have tried letting Flexi tile the image. Doesn't seem to make any difference. I get the temp/humidity thing, but a full inch? Vehicle wraps aren't bad as the tile size is smaller and we seem to have less trouble, but we do a lot of box truck and semi trailer wraps and these 8'+ panels are the ones that have most of the problems. This printer was an upgrade from the L25500 and just like the other post mentioned, we never had this problem before. We have had this printer 2 years now, and I literally want to throw it out the window. Don't get me wrong, the print quality is fantastic, but we prints wrap literally every day, and my guys are about to revolt.

 

[eahicks]

I stopped using Phototex for this reason, among others. That stuff stretches/shrinks too much due to heat fluctuation. I just installed a mural yesterday, printed on General Formulations 226 Wallmark. This stuff is awesome. It's 6 mil, so a bit thicker. It doesn't stretch. Install was a snap...some care is still needed when lining up your panels, but from top to bottom, everything lines up dead on. And 226 is VERY opaque and white, unlike Phototex which is nearly yellow compared to Phototex.

 

[larkinja]

I stopped using Phototex for this reason, among others. That stuff stretches/shrinks too much due to heat fluctuation. I just installed a mural yesterday, printed on General Formulations 226 Wallmark. This stuff is awesome. It's 6 mil, so a bit thicker. It doesn't stretch. Install was a snap...some care is still needed when lining up your panels, but from top to bottom, everything lines up dead on. And 226 is VERY opaque and white, unlike Phototex which is nearly yellow compared to Phototex.

Oh so it was the material? Darn, this is not my problem. I am having the issue regardless of what I print on. I am mostly using 3M IJ180CV3, 3M IJ40C, Oracal 3951RA and Oracal 3651RA. Have the problem on all of these.

 

[larkinja]

I work at an HP dealer, and we had a lot more problems with the length accuracy of Latex 260 and 280 than with the 300-series. With the 260 and 280 (26500 and 28500) it was a problem of the infrared temperature sensor, and how it works on uni- or multicolor surfaces.

On the Latex 360, HP have recognized a problem with the take-up-roller. After a customer had complains about that, I have tested it with printing long tiles without it, and it works with my application. HP have created a counterweight kit what reduces the strength of the dancer roller, could help in your case too.

Hi FrankW,

Do you have any more information on this counterweight kit? At this point I am willing to try anything. I find it hard to believe it could pull it an extra inch longer without it affecting or showing in the print, but at this point I am at a bit of a loss. We have had techs out here a couple times and they can't figure it out either.

 

[dypinc]

Oh so it was the material? Darn, this is not my problem. I am having the issue regardless of what I print on. I am mostly using 3M IJ180CV3, 3M IJ40C, Oracal 3951RA and Oracal 3651RA. Have the problem on all of these.

So OMAS disabled or enabled seems to make no difference for you.

 

[larkinja]

So OMAS disabled or enabled seems to make no difference for you.

We have tried it both ways and it seems to make no difference.

 

[Dan360]

I've noticed that the 360 seems to feed differently depending on the size of the roll (full, half, quarter etc.). I see this when printing double sided banners. The banners from the beginning of the roll seem a bit shorter than the ones from closer to the end of the roll. And then when printing the other side, they are reversed so really the only ones that line up perfectly are in the middle of the roll and differ in size by about 0.25 - 0.5" on both ends of the roll. This is more noticeable on larger 60" rolls than say a 38".

Not sure if this is relevant to the issue here, but it's something I noticed from printing lots of full rolls of banners.

 

[larkinja]

I've noticed that the 360 seems to feed differently depending on the size of the roll (full, half, quarter etc.). I see this when printing double sided banners. The banners from the beginning of the roll seem a bit shorter than the ones from closer to the end of the roll. And then when printing the other side, they are reversed so really the only ones that line up perfectly are in the middle of the roll and differ in size by about 0.25 - 0.5" on both ends of the roll. This is more noticeable on larger 60" rolls than say a 38".

Not sure if this is relevant to the issue here, but it's something I noticed from printing lots of full rolls of banners.

Hmm, that is an interesting thought. Sure would be frustrating if that is the problem as we print entire rolls daily. Although the panels can be a quarter inch off from one to the next, so only 8' of material has been taken off the roll at that point.