Cant Print Dark Colors

Eek. What is that color supposed to be? Do all dark colors look like this? Is it only happening on this particular Avery vinyl or others as well?

From that picture it looks almost like an ink starvation issue.

 

That's a bad piece of vinyl. Ink starvation would have showed up predominantly in the black areas too.

 

This is a simple test, try printing part of the image on a different kind of vinyl. If the image prints well on it then you more than likely have a bad batch of mpi 1005.

I worked for a company that used a lot of mpi 1005. Every once in a while we would get a bad batch that would have trouble with the ink.

~Chris

 

Looks to me like you have some of the other colors dropping where they shouldn't. Check the wipers and clean the encoder strip.

 

If your wiper isn't nicked there's no need to replace it.

Mine is two years old and works just fine. As long as you keep everything clean and well maintained, the service intervals can be extended quite a bit.

 

I'd change the wipers. You should do it about once a year. They can get worn and stiff and lose their effectiveness. A dirty encoder strip will drop colors where they don't belong but that will be more uniform. The mixed colors look like they may be associated with a short cleaning or something of that sort.

If the heads are old, they may be putting out too much ink. Try doing something to lighten it up to reduce the amount of ink. I'm not familiar with your system so I don't know what you can do in that regards.

 

One thing I used to do when I was trying to trouble shoot a problem like that was print a foot of each of the ink colors the full width of the material. So on a cmyk machine I would print a foot of cyan, a foot of magenta and so on.

It might help narrow it down to a certain color. To me that still looks like a material issue.

 

Just another thought...

The stray colors appear to be on a cycle. The only thing I can think of that is on a cycle is the heaters. If the heat is focused in one spot more than another the result would be that the vinyl would raise up from uneven expansion. Raising the head to the upper position may clear up the problem.

This vinyl may be more susceptible to warping from the heat.

 

I get similiar results when trying to print an RGB file through a CMYK printer.