Horrible Color Printing??? Sp300V

[Turbophein]

when the crop marks are printed for cutting are they on a double pass setting? my roland black does not look as good as the crop marks.

 

[Turbophein]

There are a few things that will help with this problem.

1)

2)

3)

4) Your heads are out of alignment with each other and need to be dialed in physically and then calibrated in service mode.

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I just seen this suggestion, i've done everything else, maybe this is my problem??? would it cause the banding effect i got in this print test?

Offsite pic replaced. Please observe our rules on photo posting.

 

[mark in tx]

You're going to continue to waste material, ink, and time with the trial and error method. That costs money.
Think about having someone come in and properly profile your machine.
It may cost 2k up front, but it will save you more than that over the long run because you won't be wasting material, ink and time with every setup.

 

[Custom_Grafx]

I suggest reading the below two docs.

To use 100% k in versaworks, you need to set special color so that the rip interprets your black as 100% k output. Usually though, I prefer to print black the way the rip interprets it via colour profiling.

http://support.rolanddga.com/docs/D.../Manuals and Guides/VersaWorks3_Profiling.pdf

http://www.roland.co.za/SupportPage/AJ-1000/Appli/rvw_spot_color_replace.pdf

 

[Custom_Grafx]

You're going to continue to waste material, ink, and time with the trial and error method. That costs money.
Think about having someone come in and properly profile your machine.
It may cost 2k up front, but it will save you more than that over the long run because you won't be wasting material, ink and time with every setup.

+1... unless you want to learn

 

[mark in tx]

I learned more from the guy that did my profiling than I learned reading anything.

 

[Turbophein]

thanks for the tips guys, i will try contacting someone about coming down and the quick reading i just did mentioned feed calibration??? i need to mess with that and the heat settings i think...


i'll let you know, back to reading!

 

[Custom_Grafx]

Yes, the manual will have all that and it's important to know.

Feed calibration, bi-directional adjustment, also look up "environment match".

While you're at it, check out print and cut calibration.

 

[Turbophein]

well i tried overprinting twice and the quality came out much better! haven't realled messed with the heat or feed calibration yet.

 

[Gabriel]

What are the temperatures on heater and dryer? Those are very important in the economy of printing process. If you are printing on vinyl it should be 37-38 on heater and 42-45 on dryer.
The feed calibration is that test in the pic above(the one with 2 black squares) and looks ok(I think).
Enter the Roland site in download section and you will find a lot of ICC profiles for a lot a materials. Just try some of them and see the difference. If it's not any difference, then you have to call someone to check you printer and see what's going on. Might be the ICC profiles or something else.
If you are using ESL-max inks, then something it's not ok, because you shouldn't have any kind of problems. IF you are using 3rd party inks then you need ICC profiles for it.
What kind of vinyl are you using(producer)?
One more thing...on SP-300 you have only one position for the head hight.
Hope that helps!

 

[Turbophein]

What are the temperatures on heater and dryer? Those are very important in the economy of printing process. If you are printing on vinyl it should be 37-38 on heater and 42-45 on dryer.
The feed calibration is that test in the pic above(the one with 2 black squares) and looks ok(I think).
Enter the Roland site in download section and you will find a lot of ICC profiles for a lot a materials. Just try some of them and see the difference. If it's not any difference, then you have to call someone to check you printer and see what's going on. Might be the ICC profiles or something else.
If you are using ESL-max inks, then something it's not ok, because you shouldn't have any kind of problems. IF you are using 3rd party inks then you need ICC profiles for it.
What kind of vinyl are you using(producer)?
One more thing...on SP-300 you have only one position for the head hight.
Hope that helps!

my equipment:

sp300v
oracal 3165g ra
roland eco sol inks

thanks for letting me know what that test was, i will see if i can get it any better! i will lower the print settings a little and see how that does.

thanks again

 

[CentralSigns]

I noticed you had mentioned the black wasn't black. Try using 70 70 70 100 when you build your file, and that should solve that issue by giving you a rich dark black.

 

[eye4clr]

You're going to continue to waste material, ink, and time with the trial and error method. That costs money.
Think about having someone come in and properly profile your machine.
It may cost 2k up front, but it will save you more than that over the long run because you won't be wasting material, ink and time with every setup.

+1000

If the consultant is worth their weight in hairballs, they'll be able to diagnose your grain problem in minutes.

There is a lot of discussion of possible things here, some matter, some don't. It could be as simple as you don't know the limitations of your printer. Maybe the expectation you have is based on comparing a 4 color machine with 6 color machine. On close scrutiny, there are big differences in "grain".

The profile does have a huge effect on how K gets used in mixing colors. The black dot is very obvious and can make a good print look VERY grainy up close. Custom profiling gives you the opportunity to choose how K plays a role, when it starts to get used in the lightness scale, and how aggressively it gets used. Many "canned" profiles use K too early in light colors or too late in the lightness scale, causing you to waste ink.

Now that you've gotten the basic use down, hiring a consultant can pay off big time. Newbies I've worked with tend to get much more from 2 days of training with me compared to weeks of trying to leverage their dealer to help them or months and years of trying to learn by wasting material, time, and energy.

Expect to pay $1000-1500 per day and I recommend going the route of getting trained vs having them do all the work and you being left in the dark. Finding someone in your general area saves you paying travel in addition.

 

[Gabriel]

Hi,
If the black is not black, then, in Versa Works, in the window where you have the "Quality" settings, at color management settings, put it on custom(the last one). Then you press "properties" button and select "preserve primary color" and "use embeded ICC profile". That should halp.
Also, you can set on color managment section - "density control only" or "max impact".
Try them both and let us know the results.
Good luck!

 

[jason91]

What are your rendering intents? If they're not 'No Color Correction' for everything except bitmaps, which should be set to 'Perceptual', then change them and try again.

You can futz around with profiles and maybe one day hit something close to what you want. Change your rendering intents to the above and see what happens.

There's two ways to approach this. Endless screwing around with an entire library of profiles or just going with these rendering intents and finding the one or two profiles that work the best.

With the former method you can quite possibly achieve actual color matching. It lets you talk in all kinds of arcane jargon and perhaps is spiritually satisfying but it's a massive time sink and tends to burn up a butt load of media and ink. I'd much rather be doing other things.

With the latter, print out a Pantone chart on the media you're using and match whatever colors you need to that chart. Regardless of what appears on your monitor, what comes out of the printer is the truth.

I have a few of these charts hanging on the wall, one on banner material and one each for a couple of different types of vinyl. All printed with the same profile and, with minor and trivial variation, functionally identical. When someone wants some specific color, I point them to the proper color chart and tell them to pick something off of that chart that matches or is close. If there's two colors that are close, pick the darker.

Where is rendering intents found? No color Correction....where is that? How and where do you lower and raise the print head? Is it in Service mode?

 

[Turbophein]

well i am geting my printing much better when using certain colors, i guess i will just stay away from the other colors.

i am still having isues with the black though. it only comes out good if i overprint. i have tried uni diection, max impact with preserve colors, slow head speed high head speed, it all comes out looking banded unless i overprint.

centralsigns i will try that out today and hope it gives me what i am looking for, thanks!
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[Turbophein]

i was just looking through the color management properties in versaworks and i seen the simulation target profiles, should i just these from adobe to roland sign profiles?


also noticed the oracal profile for my vinyl has a 0% feed calibration, where as the GCVP profile i am using for the better quality has -10% feed calibration. i was thinking it was worth a shot to change it to 0%, what do you think?

 

[strypguy]

I have the same machine you do. As I stated before, I have used GCVP and PCV2 profiles in versaworks for all my printing. I've printed on mostly oracal vinyls,3M and Avery wall vinyl, all using the same profiles. Never had any color problems.
Most if any of my problems came from cross contamination of the colors from bad captops etc. Also, these machines seem to have a problem as the inks get lower in one or more of the cartridges causing a suction that can pull ink into the other damper and mix your colors. Make sure you do a test print before you start printing. I usually can run a medium clean to get my colors printing correctly. Hope this helps.
I also use versaworks color chart for my spot colors. Not sure what you are printing but it could be a color issue in your file.

John

 

[Turbophein]

I have the same machine you do. As I stated before, I have used GCVP and PCV2 profiles in versaworks for all my printing. I've printed on mostly oracal vinyls,3M and Avery wall vinyl, all using the same profiles. Never had any color problems.
Most if any of my problems came from cross contamination of the colors from bad captops etc. Also, these machines seem to have a problem as the inks get lower in one or more of the cartridges causing a suction that can pull ink into the other damper and mix your colors. Make sure you do a test print before you start printing. I usually can run a medium clean to get my colors printing correctly. Hope this helps.
I also use versaworks color chart for my spot colors. Not sure what you are printing but it could be a color issue in your file.

John

well as of now all i am printing is versaworks color charts, i just tried all kinds of different sugtgestions, only made it worse. now i can't get it back to the way it was printing before. i need to set everything back to default. then just use the gcvp file. its my best quality yet but the black is horrible, not sure how that is going to work. black is in everything!

 

[strypguy]

Interesting Problem. Hope you get it figured out. I print all my black using Roland color BK21A.

John