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FB700 Full Bleed Printing

jasonx

jasonx

New Member
Hey guys,

Learning how to print full bleed.

The manual states this is the procedure:

Overprinting
Ordinarily (without overprinting) the printer will reject any job that exceeds the printable area of the
media. Because some media sheets are not precisely square, overprinting may be necessary to
achieve a full-bleed edge-to-edge print.
Overprinting is enabled by setting a negative value for the left and/or top margin.
The printer does not alter the job; i.e., enlarge the job or add extra pixels to accomplish overprinting.
The job must be resized prior to sending it through the RIP. For best results:
 Size the job slightly larger than the media dimensions. Depending on the squareness of the media,
add approximately 0.25 inch (6 mm) to width and length.
 Send (spool) the job to the printer’s hard drive using the Save Only feature.
 Set negative left and top margins: -0.125 inch (-3 mm).
 Set positive right and bottom margins: 0.125 inch (3 mm).
 Print the stored job.
 To prevent a build-up of ink on the belt, clean immediately with IPA. If ink is allowed to continue to
cure, it will be necessary to soak the area with IPA before it can be wiped off. Do not scrape ink off
of the belt.
Click to expand...

When I do this the printer says the image is too big for the media and its going to be clipped.

How do you guys get around this.

Cheers
Jason
 
C

cwb143

New Member
I don't know what that printer expects to print for a bleed. but In my experience with other machines is that you need to know what the very maximum printable area is on your printer. and make a setting for that in your rip call it max table or something. Then Make your file to that size nothing bigger. Now if your print station software is asking to change a setting I wouldn't know what that is.
 
particleman

particleman

New Member
Have you actually went ahead and sent a job like this? I believe it will complain but prints it properly anyway. The important part is the negative margins, this allows the oversized job to print correctly.
 
jasonx

jasonx

New Member
Cheers guys. Its working correctly. Just thought setting negative margins would let the printer know that I want to print on the bed instead of reporting the image including bleeds is larger then the boards. Its all good :)
 
FishnSigns

FishnSigns

New Member
Overprinting is nice but cleaning ink off the belt is a pain in the butt. We used 99% isopropyl and box tape. Worked but not the fastest method. I'm open to other suggestions for cleaning ink off the belt.
 
jasonx

jasonx

New Member
FishnSigns said:
Overprinting is nice but cleaning ink off the belt is a pain in the butt. We used 99% isopropyl and box tape. Worked but not the fastest method. I'm open to other suggestions for cleaning ink off the belt.
Click to expand...

Thats how I'm cleaning it off. I'm mainly printing coroplast this last week. So the build up doesn't affect the printing. But if I were to load SAV or roll stock I'd imagine not have a smooth belt would affect it.

Any cleaning tips appreciated as well.
 
cdiesel

cdiesel

New Member
Don't waste your time cleaning the belt.. until you have to. We've cleaned our 950 a couple times, taking a full day with 99% IPA, chizzlers, and razors.

Our 700 doesn't see much ink on the belt, but our 950 has had its share. Since we installed our Zund, we tend to not print full bleeds much anymore.
 
N

neil_se

New Member
I had problems with this part of the procedure:

 Set negative left and top margins: -0.125 inch (-3 mm).
 Set positive right and bottom margins: 0.125 inch (3 mm).

With the positive right and trailing margins it just stopped printing short of the edge. I had success printing today with -0.5cm for all margins and the print file set at the same size.
 
S

sandraF

New Member
Hello,

I see that most of you have the HP FB500 or FB700
I saw it at SGIA and wanted to get feedback from real users.
From what Im hearing, this machine does everything and is wonderful... So I'm asking you:
Is this machine a real production machine? is it reliable, what weaknesses did you notice?
I saw on another forum that it causes vertical banding on dark black and blues...
Any insight is greatly appreciated.
Thank you :)
 
jasonx

jasonx

New Member
sandraF said:
Hello,

I see that most of you have the HP FB500 or FB700
I saw it at SGIA and wanted to get feedback from real users.
From what Im hearing, this machine does everything and is wonderful... So I'm asking you:
Is this machine a real production machine? is it reliable, what weaknesses did you notice?
I saw on another forum that it causes vertical banding on dark black and blues...
Any insight is greatly appreciated.
Thank you :)
Click to expand...

Hey Sandra,

Only had the machine two weeks so can't give you an indepth review of the machine.

I've done a couple of 8 hour runs on the machine. It didn't skip a beat.
The initial installation and setup takes a day or two to get right. You need everything level and balanced etc.

The Pros so far its got great quality, its really easy to use, the pins for loading multiple sheets makes it really easy to feed smaller boards for longer runs, the design is fairly simple and its easy to maintain so far.

The cons would be having to change over for the white ink option. But we knew that going into it.

Haven't seen any vertical banding as of yet. Mainly running coroplast and banner so far. Will be testing more substrates soon.
 
C

Captain Quint

New Member
Thanks Jason, finally got some down-time to play with the margins. It took a bit of tweaking to get where I wanted. I've got my left margin set at -.31 and the lead margin at -.263. Could you tell me why they show up as -.2 when I go into margin settings?
 
jasonx

jasonx

New Member
Not sure when I set my margins they are to two decimal places in CM.

If you have a board thats 100cm by 100cm and your image is 100.6cm by 100.6cm

You margins would be -.3

It's easier to set up consistent bleeds for margins to make your workflow abit more streamlined.

3mm is abit overkill from what we've found 1.5m - 2mm bleed is sufficient unless its a really expensive material like a custom door etc and you want to be sure. If its thick make sure you tape the etc if you don't want over spray hitting the sides.
 
Bogie1of8

Bogie1of8

New Member
sandraF said:
Hello,

I see that most of you have the HP FB500 or FB700
I saw it at SGIA and wanted to get feedback from real users.
From what Im hearing, this machine does everything and is wonderful... So I'm asking you:
Is this machine a real production machine? is it reliable, what weaknesses did you notice?
I saw on another forum that it causes vertical banding on dark black and blues...
Any insight is greatly appreciated.
Thank you :)
Click to expand...

We've had our FB500 for almost 2 years and it's been very reliable. We've printed on pretty much everything you can think of including but not limited to: Raw cedar, accoustical ceiling tiles, glass, mirror, dimond plate, shear weave window fabric, various coated and uncoated fabrics including 100% cotton, marine grade upholstery vinyl plus all the regular sign materials.

We sent samples of the marine grade upholstery fabric to a lab and had it ASTM tested for durability and it passed the 30000 double rub test, rating it for "heavy duty" rating. We do have adhesion issues with Max Metal so we don't use that anymore. My only other complaint would be we just can't or haven't found an eye popping red. So any users that have a popping red figured out I would love that info!
 
jasonx

jasonx

New Member
cdiesel said:
Don't waste your time cleaning the belt.. until you have to. We've cleaned our 950 a couple times, taking a full day with 99% IPA, chizzlers, and razors.

Our 700 doesn't see much ink on the belt, but our 950 has had its share. Since we installed our Zund, we tend to not print full bleeds much anymore.
Click to expand...

Hey Chris,

Have you got any more tips on cleaning the belt? I'd like to get mine fairly clean. Our Zund arrives shortly so I won't have a huge need to print full bleed any more.
 
ForgeInc

ForgeInc

New Member
sandraF said:
Hello,

I see that most of you have the HP FB500 or FB700
I saw it at SGIA and wanted to get feedback from real users.
From what Im hearing, this machine does everything and is wonderful... So I'm asking you:
Is this machine a real production machine? is it reliable, what weaknesses did you notice?
I saw on another forum that it causes vertical banding on dark black and blues...
Any insight is greatly appreciated.
Thank you :)
Click to expand...

We actually have 3 of them now. Once you get the hang of 'em, they print beautifully although they aren't speed demons. But, you better have a good tech pretty close by, they are finicky and need to be maintenanced often.

We occasionally had banding after our first purchase but switched to Caldera which helped, we also got the hang of using shuttering features, building proper profiles and choosing appropriate print speeds/quality settings for different substrates to limit banding.
 
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