Need Help Consistant Color On Multiple Panels Roland Printer?

[Signguy1964]

Take a look at the attached photos. The first image is what we are trying to get the finished product to look like. It is four panels at 12'--0" high vertically seamed. It is printed on Korographics Artist Canvas digital wall covering.

The file was brought up to full size in Photoshop and then cropped into panels with a small overlap and saved as four eps files. I printed them and when installed the color isn't the same and isn't going to be acceptable and will now have to be reprinted.

My question is how can I get the printer to print consistent color from one file to the next when they need to overlap each other and have the colors match? Hoping someone has had this issue and found a solution to the problem.

Roland's tech support last time I spoke with them wasn't very helpful. The printer always wants to print greys with a slight purple tone to them but that is another problem.

 

[printhog]

..

 

[printhog]

First off why aren't you tiling in your rip? That what they're designed to do. Give the rip the whole design in one piece, let it place the tiles and the overlaps. If your rip doesn't do that it's far too simple to make this job without these kind of problems.

When you do rip, flip every other tile by 180 degrees. The rip will have that option as well. This way any surface coating defects in the media will be aligned, and you'll lessen their effect. If your rip doesn't have that option, again you're limited for the resolutions but there are some tips I'll give you.

Your profile is why you've got purple going on in the greys. Does your rip support making your own profiles? Printing accurate greys requires accurate profiles. If you have no way to do that, then contact Correct Color, they're a merchant member here and can help you with a new rip and the color issues.

What youre seeing looks like ink starvation, where the heads don't get enough flow. But it may not be. For starters, slow down the print speed by 25% and add a .03 delay per pass. That'll give the heads time to refill. Bad damper filters can cause that.

I'd suspect your environmental conditions are to dry and that you have air flow over the print area combined with platen temperatures set too high. This causes heads to get dirty and reduces print ability. Reduce temperature and keep all covers in place to assure the carriage area stays in the proper temperature.

Consistent color on those printers requires the automatic cleaning and head wipe cycle be very short intervals. As the heads dry out and overspray develops on the jetting face, ink is deflected and jetting is reduced. Auto cleaning is designed to wipe the head at regular intervals for that. These printers are very sensitive to color shifts if your using Variable dot printing options.

Change your cleaning cycle to much shorter intervals, about 2 feet is where I keep mine.

Also check your wipers and be sure they're spotless clean and new.

As a work around , and a good general practice, you can set up a "wet strip" on both sides of your art to print 100% of each channel. Wet strips should be at least .150" wide per color. The idea is to fire all the jets at every pass so ink is forced thru and none of the jetting ports dry up. These are also options in all the rips.

Hope that helps


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[Andy_warp]

One way we avoid this is to add thick slugs of your spot color along side the print.

It wastes a little material but makes it easier on the ink flow where severe transitions appear.
It's worse under your rich black bar...it's a shock to the heads.

We do this for most spot colors...especially when the background is predominantly white.

 

[printhog]

Reminds me of the "tired nibs" issues that estat printers had.

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