Registration Marks

[PC Graphics]

i have a CJV30-130 with flexi sign pro. My issue is the cutter is having trouble recognizing the LR mark. If I set it to recognize 4 on the initial set up it will find 4 then call it to cut it will find the front 2 and miss mostly the LR but sometimes it will hit that one and miss the RR mark. I ran all the set ups and everything seems to check out. Seems to mostly bother if I do the job seperate.

 

[alevit53]

We have the 160 for over a year now. Flexi has a problem with registration marks and cutting on the Mimaki. We struggled for months until the Mimaki tech came in and basically reinstalled the machine and tested all the cutting functions. If you ditch Flexi for print/cut and use Rasterlink it will see all the registration marks and cut within 1/16 over a 10 foot piece. If you have not been trained by a certified Mimaki tech, I urge you to get them in and go over all the steps necessary to get the cuts right. We wasted hundreds of dollars of material until we finally got it set up correctly.

The problem is that if you are using PRINT/CUT with Rasterlink, you cannot use your color profiles you set up in Flexi.
Mimaki's answer is to use their profiling package which by itself is over $4k. Fortunately we were able to download the profiles we need from the Mimaki site to get "close" and tweak the print in the rip. Not an ideal solution but it is a work around.

 

[bob]

i have a CJV30-130 with flexi sign pro. My issue is the cutter is having trouble recognizing the LR mark. If I set it to recognize 4 on the initial set up it will find 4 then call it to cut it will find the front 2 and miss mostly the LR but sometimes it will hit that one and miss the RR mark. I ran all the set ups and everything seems to check out. Seems to mostly bother if I do the job seperate.

I've been printing and cutting for lo these many years and I have no idea what the above quote might mean. You aren't sending a telegram or texting your BFF. Spell things out. Use as many words as necessary so what you're trying to say might actually make sense. For extra credit, using proper grammar is always boon as well.

 

[PC Graphics]

I've been printing and cutting for lo these many years and I have no idea what the above quote might mean. You aren't sending a telegram or texting your BFF. Spell things out. Use as many words as necessary so what you're trying to say might actually make sense. For extra credit, using proper grammar is always boon as well.

Bob, I do apologize for offenending you so I will explain. LR, RR, RF, LF are common terms explaining a specific corner. Such as LR would mean Left Rear and RR would mean Right Rear, etc. I hope that clears it up. So any other constructive criticism on the topic would be appreciated. As far as grammar I'm not sure what "cutting for lo " and "grammar is always boon as well" in your post is referring to. Thank you

 

[bob]

Bob, I do apologize for offenending you so I will explain. LR, RR, RF, LF are common terms explaining a specific corner. Such as LR would mean Left Rear and RR would mean Right Rear, etc. I hope that clears it up. So any other constructive criticism on the topic would be appreciated. As far as grammar I'm not sure what "cutting for lo " and "grammar is always boon as well" in your post is referring to. Thank you

Offend me? Don't flatter yourself. Especially with a patronizing apology.

The terms 'LR', 'BL', while it's obvious what they mean, is not particularly common usage.

"recognize 4" is ambiguous. 4 what? Moreover, civilized folk spell numbers used in this context.

The phrase is 'cutting [or whatever] for lo these many years', not ' cutting for lo'. The original phrase 'proper grammar is always a boon as well' should be clear to anyone with a vocabulary more advanced than third grade.

The grammar to which I refer are your words 'to mostly bother', which is a classic split infinitive.

Constructive criticism? No such thing. Just plain old vanilla criticism. Constructive criticism as close to being an oxymoron and a concept only in vogue at Pollyanna U. and other spots where never is heard a discouraging word. Positive feedback seldom teaches anything. It's from negative feedback that you can actually learn something.

 

[Northstar296]

I bought a Mimaki CJV150-130 machine last September (2016) and I use Flexi 12. My problem is very intermittent, (6 times since I owned it) it doesn't print the LR registration mark. I have noticed that it only happens when I print a length of 8 to 10 feet or more. Of course the last time it happened, it was on a roll of Oracal 5650RA It happened back to back ten foot runs and one 8 foot run. And because it happens so few and far between, I never bothered to look and laminated all three sheets. It wasn't until the machine didn't recognize the 3rd mark that I noticed it. To be honest, Even if I did notice it, it would only have saved me the expense of lamination. Because of it being the left rear mark, the job was completely ruined. I called Mimaki, and they said it was a software issue. I called SAI and they could not duplicate it, so they didn't know what to tell me. The technician from Pioneer Supply (The company where I bought the machine) downloaded new drivers for Windows 10 and said, he has had nothing but problems with Flexi and Windows 10. All I know is I am out $600.00 and everywhere I turn I get the shoulder shrug and the hands up in the air.The only reason I use Flexi is that I am very familiar with it and I do a lot of contour cutting. They said I would need Adobe Illustrator to put cut lines on all the artwork. So, learning new software, the extra step of exporting to AI and the color profile issues, it made more sense to upgrade my version of Flexi to 12 so it could run the drivers for my Mimaki CJV 150-130. The main point of this post is to ask anyone if they ever heard of a registration mark not being printed? I find it odd that it prints the right rear but not the left rear. Mimaki said they never heard of it. SAI said they never heard of it. Pioneer's technician said he never heard of it.

 

[Solventinkjet]

For what it's worth, if you have issues with the printer finding registration marks and don't want to throw away the job, you can set it up to only look for the first one. Also, look up in your manual on how to adjust the sensor sensitivity and make sure there isn't a very bright light source shining on the vinyl such as a window or bright lamp.

 

[Northstar296]

For what it's worth, if you have issues with the printer finding registration marks and don't want to throw away the job, you can set it up to only look for the first one. Also, look up in your manual on how to adjust the sensor sensitivity and make sure there isn't a very bright light source shining on the vinyl such as a window or bright lamp.

Thank you for the tip. What I tried to do was, I took an old registration mark and carefully measured the position of where it should go. It took me a few attempts to get it close enough that it would proceed to the right rear mark but when it cut it, it wasn't in the correct position and most were cut out of the bleed area. So I am not sure if reading just one would have been any more accurate. Just so odd that is only printed 3 registration marks in the 1st place.

 

[Retro Graphics]

We have the 160 for over a year now. Flexi has a problem with registration marks and cutting on the Mimaki. We struggled for months until the Mimaki tech came in and basically reinstalled the machine and tested all the cutting functions. If you ditch Flexi for print/cut and use Rasterlink it will see all the registration marks and cut within 1/16 over a 10 foot piece. If you have not been trained by a certified Mimaki tech, I urge you to get them in and go over all the steps necessary to get the cuts right. We wasted hundreds of dollars of material until we finally got it set up correctly.

The problem is that if you are using PRINT/CUT with Rasterlink, you cannot use your color profiles you set up in Flexi.
Mimaki's answer is to use their profiling package which by itself is over $4k. Fortunately we were able to download the profiles we need from the Mimaki site to get "close" and tweak the print in the rip. Not an ideal solution but it is a work around.

also I find I have to set the registration marks larger than the default settings. I don't think I do any registration marks smaller than 0.75 in length and 0.036 in thickness. I have a UCJV300-160 and print/laminate/cut is a pain b/c if I'm not plum level (like both top registration marks are exactly the same distance away from the blade cut line then even when it reads the registration marks my cuts will start going off after 3'. I actually found this as I was looking to see if Flexi handled registration marks better than RasterLink as I was wondering if the issue isn't my printer but RasterLink itself.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

also I find I have to set the registration marks larger than the default settings. I don't think I do any registration marks smaller than 0.75 in length and 0.036 in thickness. I have a UCJV300-160 and print/laminate/cut is a pain b/c if I'm not plum level (like both top registration marks are exactly the same distance away from the blade cut line then even when it reads the registration marks my cuts will start going off after 3'. I actually found this as I was looking to see if Flexi handled registration marks better than RasterLink as I was wondering if the issue isn't my printer but RasterLink itself.

It would probably be more accurate if you used smaller marks. We use .5 for everything. Cut 14' the other day and it was spot on. Make sure you load it straight too.

 

[Retro Graphics]

the larger the job, the larger it [rasterlink] wants me to make the registration marks. i've had smaller marks and it completely couldn't find them. I had to measure withing 1/16" when aligning the job i did this past weekend and it still started dragging out of alignment. Granted it was working with reflective so the drag from all that glass can affect it too.

 

[Dasdesignguy]

Flexi is the worst.

 

[micadesign]

i cut always from fine cut with no issue

print and cut by ucjv300-160

 

[bob]

There are so many different flavors of registration marks the it's difficult to make general statements about them. I know exactly how Graphtec marks work and it's not a stretch to assume that other styles use the same philosophy as well. Although with some of them it's beyond me how they actually function. With they Graphtec type 2 mark for example, the size of the mark has absolutely nothing to do with accuracy. The plotter is looking for one specific and unambiguous landmark on each mark. For the type 2 mark, which is two perpendicular lines forming a 'corner bracket' so to speak, the plotter is looking for the inside corner where the two perpendicular lines meet. This point is infinitely small so only the tolerances of the hardware that printed it and is attempting to read it effect the accuracy of the cut. That being the case the mark can be as large as the plotter will tolerate. The larger the marks the less accurate the initial media alignment has to be since the plotter just has to find a piece of a mark to locate the exact point it's looking for.

 

[Solventinkjet]

There are so many different flavors of registration marks the it's difficult to make general statements about them. I know exactly how Graphtec marks work and it's not a stretch to assume that other styles use the same philosophy as well. Although with some of them it's beyond me how they actually function. With they Graphtec type 2 mark for example, the size of the mark has absolutely nothing to do with accuracy. The plotter is looking for one specific and unambiguous landmark on each mark. For the type 2 mark, which is two perpendicular lines forming a 'corner bracket' so to speak, the plotter is looking for the inside corner where the two perpendicular lines meet. This point is infinitely small so only the tolerances of the hardware that printed it and is attempting to read it effect the accuracy of the cut. That being the case the mark can be as large as the plotter will tolerate. The larger the marks the less accurate the initial media alignment has to be since the plotter just has to find a piece of a mark to locate the exact point it's looking for.

In Mimakis the size of the mark also has nothing to do with accuracy. The reason they want you to make it bigger is so if there is any skew in the media feed, it can still catch the mark. The way Mimaki's find the mark is they first detect the change in contrast between the mark and the white media which is how it knows there is a mark. Once it finds it, no matter what the size is, it simply finds the corner of the mark and sets that as the origin point.

If you're having issues with the cut being off the longer you go, what you need to run is called the scale adjustment. It adjusts for print/cut consistency over a distance.

 

[Bill DiStasio]

I bought a Mimaki CJV150-130 machine last September (2016) and I use Flexi 12. My problem is very intermittent, (6 times since I owned it) it doesn't print the LR registration mark. I have noticed that it only happens when I print a length of 8 to 10 feet or more. Of course the last time it happened, it was on a roll of Oracal 5650RA It happened back to back ten foot runs and one 8 foot run. And because it happens so few and far between, I never bothered to look and laminated all three sheets. It wasn't until the machine didn't recognize the 3rd mark that I noticed it. To be honest, Even if I did notice it, it would only have saved me the expense of lamination. Because of it being the left rear mark, the job was completely ruined. I called Mimaki, and they said it was a software issue. I called SAI and they could not duplicate it, so they didn't know what to tell me. The technician from Pioneer Supply (The company where I bought the machine) downloaded new drivers for Windows 10 and said, he has had nothing but problems with Flexi and Windows 10. All I know is I am out $600.00 and everywhere I turn I get the shoulder shrug and the hands up in the air.The only reason I use Flexi is that I am very familiar with it and I do a lot of contour cutting. They said I would need Adobe Illustrator to put cut lines on all the artwork. So, learning new software, the extra step of exporting to AI and the color profile issues, it made more sense to upgrade my version of Flexi to 12 so it could run the drivers for my Mimaki CJV 150-130. The main point of this post is to ask anyone if they ever heard of a registration mark not being printed? I find it odd that it prints the right rear but not the left rear. Mimaki said they never heard of it. SAI said they never heard of it. Pioneer's technician said he never heard of it.

Why are you using Flexi 12. Why not download the new version and upgrade windows to windows 11. There have been a lot of upgrades that handled all of the problems of previous versions. I use it all day everyday for contour cutting labels and have not had any problems since I did those 2 things. Also you get the new jig function. I am sure you have a reason, I'm just curious, not judging.

 

[Neil]

The reason the machines miss the marks is:
If you have say inward facing L marks and the media is skewed so that the sensor goes past the outside of the mark.
If you have say outward facing L marks and the media is skewed so that the sensor goes past the inside of the mark.
In both instances it can't find them. You need to re-align the media.

It seems to me that a simple fix would be using + shaped marks instead of L shaped, if the machines would allow it.

 

[kmur13]

Has anyone tried creating the marks in a PDF, printing, then trying to register? We create the marks in an illustrator file, then make a PDF from that then print and register with no luck. The PDF has the spot color called 'Mimaki Registration Marks' but when we try to read the first mark it seems to read it, but then we send it to cut and it just goes to town without reading the other 3 marks.

I've read the manual on registration 10 times over plus done multiple things recommended on this forum and no luck. It only reads the first mark and cuts terribly (The cut seems to stretch over the width of the roll).

The only way we can get it to work is if we add the marks in rasterlink. This wouldn't be a problem but we are trying to use an MIS system to make our impositions (for automation purposes) and the MIS system creates the PDFs at the size of the substrate, so the rip has no room to add registration marks, which is why we need to be able to add the marks beforehand in the PDF.

 

[Retro Graphics]

It would probably be more accurate if you used smaller marks. We use .5 for everything. Cut 14' the other day and it was spot on. Make sure you load it straight too.

so I had the opportunity to do a 2nd reflective print/lam/cut job for the same fire dept. as the last job, so I figured I'd try the smaller marks and made them at .512 (why not .5? b/c on my mimaki i can set the size of the mark it's looking for but it has it's own increment system and it actually was at 0.5118 but rasterlink rounds to 0.512. I did one print where the letters were left to right, and a 2nd print where the letters were printed as it feeds from the roll fron to back. Needless to say I didn't really notice any improvement as the final pieces of the front to back print the alignment had came off again to the point the cut was outside the bleed. I typically do a -.030, i may have even set this one to -0.050. So from left to right (or the scan) alignment is good, but the front to bad (or feed) is where the alignment seems to come off after 30" particularly when doing multi piece cuts. such as "first name, second name, next line orginaization, next line logo, next line contact", at some point one of them will be off. Again I think this is more to do with the reflective and the drag of the glass in the vinyl. I may have to just give a much larger bleed area when working with reflectives in the future.

edit: oh I did stumble on what seemed like an obvious technique in hindsight as well. I can just scan the laser all the way across the print and see if it sits in the same place on the front left and is does on the front right as it goes over top, if not, lift arm, make adjustment, reset.