The Ultimate Guide to Fixing Banding!

[supergecko28]

Okay guys, I'm having alot of trouble out of banding later and I thought it would be great for anyone that has any information to contribute to one thread. I know this is a major problem out there especially with less experienced people like myself. I'm not looking for temporary fix's but rather cause and resolution style posts. If you notice banding, what are your immediate X steps to resolve it regardless of what the final outcome is. Including diagnosis and remedy.

I know the problem I'm having personally is not deflection or bad spots on the print head, Its only happening on certain colors (greens blues and lighter colors such as that). It very well may be a profiling setting but we dont have anyone on staff that can do profiles so I'm pretty much stuck with what I have from the factory.

This is a JV3 160 SP.

I'v noticed it starts to get resonably worse farther into a print, but I dont believe I'm experiencing ink starvation from the dampers because they have never ran dry even over long prints.

It may be worsening with the weather.

I can nix the problem usually by setting KF diffision instead of FMX press, but I dont like the grany looking results I get, not to mention the double rip time is a pain on larger prints. Grimco tech support has been of minimul help , had them out several times and basicly all they say is "well there are alot of cause's for banding" and then kinda pass it off trying to hurry and get out of here. Even on the phone they are minimul help, so it looks like im' on my own.

So anyone with a certain set of steps / remedies they take for banding please post up your routine.

 

[Fast Time]

yeah get a Roland®

 

[TheSnowman]

Sometimes it's just a directional problem. I go unidirectional and it's fine.

 

[gabagoo]

do you fiddle with media compensation while the machine is printing? Also what resolution do you print at and how many passes. On our machine I have a hell of a time with pms321. The only way to get that colour perfect is to run it unidirectional 720 x 720 8 pass and have high speed turned off. Also out of curiosity are your heads set to thick or thin? That too adds to the banding issues I have found.

 

[cptcorn]

Your problem lies within your profiles...

Make an investment into some color management tools... You will completely eliminate all banding 100%. If I just keep my profiles up to date I don't even have to mess around with the media compensation.

You can try a ton of different things, like messing with the media comp, misc other 'settings' use different profiles, but these are just temporary half arsed fixes. Good luck!

 

[ChicagoGraphics]

On my Mimaki I never get banding unless im printing it in 360x360 4 pass mode. I run 95%of my work at 720x720 8 pass high speed mode, bi directional, heads set on high. I also make my own profiles. I just made 9 banners 36"x120" with a solid royal blue background and white letters, there is no banding or any shades off on the colour anywhere on the banners. Try to keep your temp. where your printer is at 72f

 

[sh6037]

Heat

Usually when my prints on our Mimaki JV3 start banding a few minutes into the print, it's because the printer heat is set too high. The printer starts a degree or 2 before it hits it's set heat, so after a foot or 2 when the heater comes to speed, if I notice banding, we turn the heat down a degree or two and the banding stops.

Also, we recently cleaned and oiled the belt and wheel system that makes the print head go back and forth (don't know the part name) for the first time in who knows how long, and it actually seems to have made a difference in how much banding we get. All the parts that need a good cleaning and/or oiling probably have something to do with banding.

 

[DPD]

When I first purchased my printer (Mutoh) I saw what can best be described as vertical banding which I confused with horizontal banding. Now hopefully nobody jumps on my bones about the expressions I'm using for banding but I can tell you that when I see the vertical type of banding it has to do with the heat settings (as someone else said).

From day to day the temps in my shop can change and therefore my settings at the printer will of course affect the vertical banding.

I've been told by Mutoh that horizontal banding (knock on wood) is more of a setting issue with the feed rate of the material into the printer.

Good luck with it.

 

[ColesCreations]

We have had; still have this type problem, for solid colors we sometimes turn off color control in the rip (FlexiSign). Then this "ink starvation" stops and it prints fine.

So- I guess it has nothing to do with the printer, it must be a profile issue. I don't know this but; If the printer is able to print large areas of solid spot 100% c,m,y,k without color correction, then it must be fine. Time to spend some time learning how to use Eye-one I guess.

PS- I changed a couple dampers that had had white in them, there was still white ink in them more than a year after they got yellow in stead. And the filters looked very clogged from white ink. (went from 6-color plus ww to dual CMYK, hoping this would solve the banding, but still the same)

 

[BRUSHMARKS]

try adjusting it on the fly to get it to the right setting, once correct you will have to restart it or else your overall length will be incorrect

 

[SignsOfMaine]

We had an old encad and it banded like a fiend, the trick was to do what Fast Time said

It gets faint banding if it hasn't been manually cleaned around the print heads in a while. Right after cleaning it'll go away. Otherwise there isn't any.

I'm surprised it can be a simple software, rip, or profile issue. But a little research confirms that's often the case. Somehow I'd always assumed it had to be a hardware thing. I've seen guys suggest removing and reinstalling his software with the latest version (on a different board), and people on here suggest new profiles. So I guess that's where it's at.

I output from Roland versaworks and I suspect it must have pretty good color profiles because it seems like I'm downloading hundreds of megs of profiles every other week. It's almost annoying But if it's helping prevent banding I'm all for it.

 

[APC Tech NE]

Dot size/gain has a great deal to do with banding. Lower heat allows droplets to spread and cover the media more effectively. 360 mode has a larger dot size than 720 and may help. Non variable dot modes allow you to use a larger dot in the higher dpi modes, great for signs and graphics, bad for photographic elements.
Hope this helps!

 

[eforer]

Avoiding banding can get tough as your equipment gets older. My JV3 looks like its been through WWIII. Here's some tips to help get it tip top.

Its important to make sure the machine is properly calibrated. This means getting the head slant and unit adjust done correctly, followed by print adjust 2 for the mode you use the most (a JV3 only has enough memory to store 1 set of settings. I use thin for the head height, high speed) and a normal print adjust afterward. For print adjust 2 (if I remember correctly) you want to do Y-Base, select the wave form, do Y-Si, Y-Re, Y-Bi, basis set and then do the fine adjust. Do this for each waveform and then do an X-adjustment. After your done with that do a regular print adjust. Finally using a scope carefully adjust your media compensation. Also, make sure your head bracket assembly is level and the right height from the platen. It should be 2mm all the way around in "thin" mode. If that's off, fix that first and go through the procedure above.

You can get a great little microscope thing from radioshack for $10 which is perfect for calibrating printers.

Profiling is important as well. Remember that your profiles are absolutely married to your print mode settings excluding directionality. High and low speed do affect output (do a side by side comparison) typically low speed everything is more saturated. Obviously, waveform and resolution and pass count can't be changed or your output is not going to reflect what it should. Canned profiles are often terrible. Invest in a spectrophotometer.

Low humidity can cause problems too. Try to keep your print room at around 72-75 and 45%-50% humidity.

If the roll is sticking to itself (common with banner material) pre-feed off the roll or you'll be chasing your tail, the stickiness makes media comp impossible to set reliably and you'll be dialed in for a few feet than f'd again.

Run refresh level 3, lowers the likely hood of nozzle dropout. Also use the oversized dampers, the oem one's work the best.

Take it easy on the take up reel tension (can cause more issues than you think). Especially if your using a lot of heat. These days I've been running relatively high pre-heat and low print heat for most of my oracal media. Helps reduce buckling while still getting the media temps up. You can use a non-contact (infra-red) thermometer to figure out a good balance between the two heaters. Basically I try to get the media temperature as high as I can while still having it lay flat on the platen. Running a very hot pre heater and a relatively cool print heater can get the media nice and hot, but keep it pretty flat.

Hope all of this helps, the whole solvent printing thing has a lot of tinkering and its just part of the game. I put a new set of heads in this week and am struggling a little trying to get everything up to par again. It takes a lot of patience, which is hard to come by when customers want their work yesterday.

 

[ColesCreations]

I made a discovery...
Heat causes the media to buckle, the print head "almost" touches the media, at regular intervals, and you get a lighter stripe every inch or so, no matter if it's 8 or 16 pass. I thought this was ink starvation, but can't be, as the printer will lay down plenty of ink to print 2-pass mode, and in 16 pass, it needs hardly any ink at all / pass.
So- I turned down the heat and raised the head to thick position, the tests I ran look fine. Will have to do some more tests on this though to make sure, had the heat at around 40 deg C both, turned down to 30 deg C now.

 

[gabagoo]

although I print almost everything in thick head mode, I find that the lighter cyans and greens are always having that banding look although it really is not banding, I think it is just the way the ink gets sprayed from the heads. If I print in thin mode this problem is absolutely gone, although in thin mode we have to many issues with ink scuffing and drying time.

 

[eforer]

What materials are you printing on? We use thin for everything except 15oz banner material (which we almost never use). If your temps are set right you should never get head strikes.

 

[ColesCreations]

We are mostly printing on Oracal 3164. Anyone else having problems with it?

And how do we know what's the right temperature?
No head strikes?

 

[TheSnowman]

Thought I'd bring this thread back from the dead. I have been having crazy trouble lately w/ my JV3. It just started all of the sudden after being fine last week. My worst part is, I have to print a bunch of stuff for a photographer by tomorrow end of day, and they are already picky enough about my prints as it is. Anyone else got some tips for the JV3?

 

[ColesCreations]

iSign said to print RGB... (in 'nother post) Haven't tried it myself yet...

 

[Samurai_Screwdriver]

I think it would be very interesting to do a little poll of what RIP those people with banding (particularly in light colors) are running. I already have my suspicions as to what the most common answer will be!