Best settings for printing a gradient on the Edge?

[SellersSign&Design]

I have an Edge LE and the latest FlexiPro. I am needing to print 4' long by 6" tall stripes on Oracal 5600 reflective. The gradient is light grey to dark grey. I haven't found a setting yet that doesn't have bad banding. It is currently set to angled screen and double dot with super gradient smoothness. Just wondering if anyone has a good recipe to print a nice gradient?

 

[J Hill Designs]

dropping the LPI should help

 

[Sign Works]

Not sure about the Edge but on my Roland thermal resin printer gradients print much smoother if rasterized, I do this in Photoshop and sometimes adding just a bit of Noise can help too. I generally create the gradient in Photoshop and save as a Tiff file, Import Tiff file into Flexi and mask with desired text/graphics.

 

[oksigns]

Like Sign Works says, banding can actually be the actual artwork too. If in illustrator, make sure the effects quality is set to 300 dpi.

Effect>Document Raster Effects>Resolution set to 300 or whatever your printer is effective at

Adding noise is one way- you can use a blend of gradients using different layer/blending modes to make the transitions less harsh

 

[SellersSign&Design]

Thank you all for the quick help! Converting to a bitmap and adding noise did help somewhat, but opened up some other issues. Flexi actually has a ton of settings and options for gradients when you dig into it, so by playing with all of those I found something that I think works very well considering I am running a thermal printer. I used a gradient fill with a single spot color. I then set the dark grey to fade from 70% to 30%. In production manager, I am running the angled screen dither type and I have it set to double dot. Gradient smoothness is "super". It has some very slight banding, but nothing that will be noticeable once installed.

 

[scott pagan]

for Edge printing gradients i like to keep a low LPI (big dots). the old Omega software had incremental steps at 16, 21.2, 32, 53, 70.7, and 106.1 LPI. i normally prefer 21.2, especially at a distance, super clean halftone, no banding or dropout gets noticed. i also keep a printed sample sheet of a chart i made with a 1 color gradient 0-100% in each of the LPI output settings to quick glance at what may or may not work for any project that comes up. the new software allows you to enter your own values if you really need more options.