Chatter

[Colin]

Can someone explain this? The other day I printed off a variety of customer's logos as small (2" x 4") sample decals for solicitation/promotion. There were two out of the bunch which, upon close inspection, had these weird little "chatter" lines in the print, coming off the edges of the letters. This only occurred on two, and they were both black. When I explored the file back in Coreldraw, they were the only ones which were RGB; all the rest were either CMYK or Roland Colors which printed perfectly.

What would cause this?


(It looked kinda like this):

 

[CanuckSigns]

whenever I have gotten this in the past, it was because i had a hair or something stuck to the printhead. I have also noticed on some customer supplied files that some blacks print so much heavier than others (to the point of being wet after clearing the heaters) is that what you were describing?

 

[Colin]

Nope. I printed a variety of decals at the same time (1 of each), and only the two with RGB black did this.

 

[bmendes]

Colin,
I agree with the above comment. RGB files can use a lot of ink that will stay wet for some time, if there is a hair or fluff attached to the print head it will smear across the wet ink and cause little tails along the edges, this may not be noticed on the cmyk files as they are already dry enough to not smear.

regards
Brett

 

[Colin]

Hmmm, interesting. So one should avoid RBG on vector images? I think I recal reading a thread where most people said they use RGB; (not that what "most people" do is always right, but just curious).

 

[bmendes]

Colin, I use RGB for raster base files and CMYK for my vector. The smears still indicate that some thing is dragging under the print head. I have also seem hair and fluff stuck under the cut carriage

Are the smear marks on both sides of a letter or line or just with the head going in one direction ??

 

[Colin]

They're just like in the image I posted.

I did a manual cleaning today (with the swab), so hopefully that took care of it.

I then sprayed the heads and everything real good with brake cleaner and then WD-40 so it should be good to go.

 

[Mainframe]

They're just like in the image I posted.

I did a manual cleaning today (with the swab), so hopefully that took care of it.

I then sprayed the heads and everything real good with brake cleaner and then WD-40 so it should be good to go.

I never heard of spraying brake cleaner & WD-40 on print heads, I am not sure you should do that.

 

[rwinninger]

I had a problen like that printing on high speed slowed it down and solved the problem.

 

[Colin]

I never heard of spraying brake cleaner & WD-40 on print heads, I am not sure you should do that.

That statement was my feeble attempt at humour.

 

[CentralSigns]

The pic you posted almost looked like when you assign text to a path in Corel x3. Just saying.