HP Designjet 26500 setup questions

[CES020]

We have a new printer and the guy that's coming to train us won't be here for 10 more days or so, and I'm just trying to dabble in a few things. We're running Onyx Production House v11, and as complex as I thought it was going to be is proving to be true. I've never been under any illusion that printing is easy.

I'm a bit overwhelmed at the moment with trying to setup profiles. I have some 3M IJ-35 I'm trying to profile right now and the choices are so vast I don't know where the sweet spot is to start with.

1200 dpi, 600 dpi, 300 dpi, 6 pass, 8 pass, 10 pass.

It appears all the default profiles that came with Onyx use 600 or 1200 dpi, mostly in the 10 or 12 pass range. I know it all varies with the job, but let's use a wrap for an example (no, I'm not going into the wrap business, and yes, I know I wouldn't use IJ-35 either). Is that something that would typically be run at 600 dpi or 300 dpi? What's a good starting point?

Would you typically have a number of profiles for each material like that? Maybe something like :

IJ-35
Profile 1 - 1200 dpi, 12 pass, bidirectional
Profile 2 - 1200 dpi, 12 pass, unidirectional
Profile 3 - 1200 dpi, 10 pass
Profile 4 - 600 dpi, 10 pass
Profile 5 - 600 dpi, 8 pass

Leaving you with maybe with a fairly large number of profiles for each media? Or do you not need to do all that? Start at 600 dpi and 8 pass, maybe try 600 and 10? Do you print much at 300? If you have an image at 150 dpi in Photoshop, would you print it at 150? 300, 600? Are they tied together like that. I would think so, but I don't see it mentioned anywhere in any sample files anyone offers up.

Thanks for any insight into this rubik's cube we call a printer

 

[poslive]

We run pretty much everything at 600dpi 10 pass bi-directional. It produces high-quality photos and posters and is still pretty fast. Unless you need to sacrifice resolution for speed to win a job it is best to keep your profiles to a minimum. We run primarily simple banners and posters with food product photos and no one has ever complained about the quality at 600dpi. There's no reason to go higher unless you're printing some serious fine art work.

You are going to love that thing. We've had ours for 2 years and 172,000 sqft of material and have had exactly one service call to replace a maintenance kit.

 

[Bly]

What poslive said.

We run most media at 10 pass 600dpi.

 

[ProWraps]

8 pass bi for wraps, 6 pass bi for banners and decals here. but we also own our own automated spectro so we can dial in our ink limits etc. i would never try that with a canned profile.

 

[CES020]

Thanks guys! That helps a lot. I'm really lucky, this machine doesn't have to make a penny for a while, so I can take the time to learn and understand it all before we start offering the service. I'm sure we'll do a few jobs here and there, but I'd like to have a much better understanding of it all before taking on things.

Okay, next question, how do you go about setting the curing time, temp, etc. I notice the 3M IJ-35 seems to be wrinkling up a little, like it's getting too much heat, but not on the print, just as it's feeding off the machine. How do you know what to adjust, the time? Temp? Both? Neither?

Also, I'm walking through the profile creation in Onyx and it's to the point where it's printed the ink level swatch. It shows 3 rows of 3 sets of blocks each, A,B, and C. The single color, Two color, and neutral chart thing. The default settings were 400,400,400. It printed, but I can't see anywhere what I'm supposed to pick from that printed swatch.

On the Single color, they all get really dark around 170 and you can see ink starting to puddle around 210-230 and up. On the two color, they get dark around 250, ink starts to puddle around 290-300, and on the neutrals, they get dark around 230-240, and the ink starts to puddle around 290 as well.

What values should I look for there? Just before they go black? I'm confused on that whole thing.

It's pointless now, since I was profiling a 300 dpi setting, but I'll do it again at 600 and I'd love to know exactly what I'm looking for.

I really do appreciate the help. I'm going to have a zillion more questions, I'm sure, but I'm glad I can take the time to mess with it for a while.

Thanks!

 

[CES020]

Pro, is that 8 pass at 600 dpi? Or do you use less?

 

[Bly]

Thanks guys! That helps a lot. I'm really lucky, this machine doesn't have to make a penny for a while, so I can take the time to learn and understand it all before we start offering the service. I'm sure we'll do a few jobs here and there, but I'd like to have a much better understanding of it all before taking on things.

Okay, next question, how do you go about setting the curing time, temp, etc. I notice the 3M IJ-35 seems to be wrinkling up a little, like it's getting too much heat, but not on the print, just as it's feeding off the machine. How do you know what to adjust, the time? Temp? Both? Neither?

Also, I'm walking through the profile creation in Onyx and it's to the point where it's printed the ink level swatch. It shows 3 rows of 3 sets of blocks each, A,B, and C. The single color, Two color, and neutral chart thing. The default settings were 400,400,400. It printed, but I can't see anywhere what I'm supposed to pick from that printed swatch.

On the Single color, they all get really dark around 170 and you can see ink starting to puddle around 210-230 and up. On the two color, they get dark around 250, ink starts to puddle around 290-300, and on the neutrals, they get dark around 230-240, and the ink starts to puddle around 290 as well.

What values should I look for there? Just before they go black? I'm confused on that whole thing.

It's pointless now, since I was profiling a 300 dpi setting, but I'll do it again at 600 and I'd love to know exactly what I'm looking for.

I really do appreciate the help. I'm going to have a zillion more questions, I'm sure, but I'm glad I can take the time to mess with it for a while.

Thanks!

Ink limits are the only step you need to make your own judgement call on the swatch results.
This post explains the settings very well. It's from Onyxtalk Forum.

Hi

I think you mean Ink Limits...

It's a difficult thing to explain unless you are looking at the swatch.

Run your eyes from light to dark (left to right). If the colours are all dry and even and simply get darker right up to the end it is said that you have no "artifacts" to deal with.

In this case you can simply set your limits when the colours have gone to a solid black. This normally happens for the single colours around 2.2 and the combinations at around 3 to 3.3.

Setting them any more than this is simply a waste of ink.

However often you will see a change in the patches as you scan the swatch from left to right. These changes are called artifacts and can be varied.

For example, they might not dry beyond a certain point and thus you would call your limits at the last dry patch - if you don't your final profile might produce wet prints with the current settings.

You can of course go back and raise the heater temps, slow the print speed etc - this might push the drying point up and allow you more darker colours within your limit, increasing gamut.

Artifacting includes other things as well - you might get shadows along the edge of the patches "picture framing" caused by too much ink drying unevenly from the outside into the centre of the patch.

You can see matting (especially in black) where the level of ink is too high to form a good gloss.

Sometimes you get "coalescence" which looks like a coarse, oily dot patten where the high ink level has not been given time to sink into the media / coating properly.

Basically any noticeable change in the look of the patches which you don't want to see in the final image - that is where you should be limiting.

Once you limit at a point, you are often restricting gamut to a certain extent (usually in the darker RGBs). Sometimes gamut is more important than the artifact you see and thus the limit is set higher than you would otherwise choose - it's your decision.

Problems occur when you are forced to set a limit at a low level due to bad artifacting - for example your patches simply wont dry (assuming you've upped the heaters, slowed the printer etc) unless you limit all of them to something under 2.5

You have two options. either declare this media as incompatible - sometimes the ink/media/printer comination just isn't a good match.

Or you can set the limits at this low level and accept your profile will never be a great one.

Two points to note here - you can use Black Ink Compensation to prevent the inevitable "capping" that will occur with such low limits.

Capping is where you get a strange grey tone amongst your shadows in a print - the colour gets deeper but just before going to black you have a grey band.

This "missing" shadow tone is the gap between the point where you have limited the ink and the point where the black is brought in.

This gap can be filled with black so that in the final print it appears to be normal. The B.I.C setting replaces these missing colour tones with black - the lower the ink limit, the higher the B.I.C needs to be from 1 to 5.

The other point, and one which took me some time to realise, is that actually the icc will do a good job of trying to fill in the missing shadow colour tones for you. Even though you may have to set low limits - say 2.4 for the RGB you think that you will now lose every colour after that point from your gamut and your profile will have no darker colours at all.

Just continue and build an icc - look at the patches you are reading - you will see many of the tones you thought you had lost in the limiting process. The icc is using other combinations of CMYK to achieve an acceptable result. It is often worth perservering and building an icc profile even if you have set low limits to get a troublesome media profiled (especially if someone is paying you to do it!)

However, hopefully you have a "good" media and can set the limits to somewhere near the norm - 2.2 for the CMY and 2.8-3.0 for the RGBK. At these settings you are usually good to go.

Ink Limits are one of those "black art" things where everyone has their own interpretations and views - these are just mine from experience & Onyx's training so others might have more advice that will help.

Good luck!

 

[ProWraps]

we print everything at 600dpi. unless you are doing fine art repros there is no need to go higher.

 

[CES020]

Thanks Bly! That's awesome! I didn't even know about that forum. I keep signing into Onyx's website and thinking "Boy, this sure lacks any useful information", only to see that forum you linked to! Man, that's great, thanks so much for sharing.

It's really exciting to think about the possibilites!

I can't thank y'all enough, you've been most helpful already. I'm about 60% through my media profiling at 600 dpi, 10 passes for the IJ-35. We bought a roll of that because it was cheap and we figured it would be a good media to learn on. Hopefully that was a decent decision. We picked up some IJ-180 and 8518 today, so once I get this all worked out, we'll play with the real stuff

 

[CES020]

Interesting 24 hours for me and the printer! After reading the responses last night, I headed straight to the printer to build the profile at 600dpi. It asked if I wanted to print the normal accuracy swatch or the higher accuracy. Who am I to skimp out on the quality? Sure, give me the 1900 swatches, it's only ink and IJ-35, right? Well, 3 hours later when it's still scanning 1900 swatches, I was rethinking my choices Finally got to the end, I told it to read the data and it said "What data?". Rats! So, a fresh start this morning, I opted for the 900 swatch version and within a relatively short time, it was done and I finished the profile. Which leads me to more questions for the day!

First, I think the prints are superior to what I was getting (I was using the default IJ-180 profile that came in Onyx for that printer). The left image shows the before and the right image shows after I profiled it. Looks like I moved in the right direction for sure.

However, that brought up the next two questions. Inside Onyx, there's a sample pantone chart. I printed it, it's a PDF that came with Onyx. Then I got my Pantone swatch book out and I don't think the colors are even remotely close to my swatches. If they were close, I'd think some minor fine tuning and it would be great, but they really aren't close, in my opinion. Is that normal? Did I profile it wrong? Did I print it wrong? Should they match, or be really close? I just don't know what I don't know, so I'm not sure what to do here.

My second question, I had a photo that had some green grass and a brown dog in it, I opened the original file in Photoshop (it's just a JPEG straight from the camera), I changed the size to reflect 150 dpi in the file, knowing I couldn't print it at it's native resolution of 72 dpi and have a decent image, but I wanted to see what the 150 would look like. I saved it as a tiff file, dropped that into Onyx and the colors aren't very vibrant at all. Very much like what you'd see when you switch from RGB to CMYK. Is that what happened to that print? The color conversion wiped the vibrance from it? Is there a different work flow I should have used, or something in Onyx I should have changed to tell it that it's a RGB image? I know when I print the RGB sample file from within Onyx, it looks amazing and it's very vibrant.

That's all my questions for the day. Thanks so much for the help and advice so far, it's helping me a great deal and I'm learning more and more each day. I'm really looking forward to being able to really run this machine and make some cool stuff.

Here's the before and after photos from the profiling. Tell me if it looks like I did it right or if I missed something obvious to you all.

Thanks!

 

[ProColorGraphics]

Are you using an i1 to read your test prints?

 

[CES020]

Are you using an i1 to read your test prints?

I'm using the on board i1 system. I don't have the stand alone model. I do have the i1 x-rite for my monitor, but no stand alone systems for measuring swatches, just the one that's on the machine.

 

[craftladies]

you can go onto hp website, and look for premade profiles. This is where I usually start. Then I use i1profiler to make sure the colour is correct. Then if I see that it is too hot and getting wrinkly, I adjust the heat settings to the profile. I usually name the profile "manufacturename-code#-whatIReferToItAs" Such as "Avery-MPI2611-wallfilm" That way I know what I need to order if I run out, and also what it is if I do not remember the code, or it helps for people who are new.