Issues Printing wraps on High Quality Setting?

[Stu Friesen]

I print wraps with a Roland VS-540i. and use 3M IJ180CVJ3 and 3M 8518 Gloss laminate. I recently printed and applied a mostly black wrap to one of our black company vehicles in order to have the image fade to black and stop at door seams in order to not have to wrap the entire truck. The printed black was not very close to the painted black. I have found through viewing other topics here that I believe I have been using the best possible methods of design (Corel X6) and export to versaworks to achieve the purest black. Beyond this, I believe the only way that I can see to achieve this is to print with the Versaworks print setting at "High Quality". With in a test print, this looks very close to the paint color. The question I have is: What drawbacks are there in using the High Quality ink settings? I believe that the ink will negatively affect the adhesive, possibly making it more aggressive. Is this an accurate assumption? Will it still be just as repositionable as normal ink amounts? Will the vinyl be more pliable and possibly too soft? Will the ink thin easier when stretched? Is extra time needed for outgassing?
I have always printed wraps with standard print quality settings and up until now have had no print issues. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Stu Friesen]

Pat thanks for the info. I have been experimenting with solid black samples based on the info you gave me and adjusting ink levels accordingly. Because the end result will be greys fading to black, no other colors would be affected by these settings. I am getting some rich blacks while printing with the standard setting but in order to match the best RGB black (previously my best results), I need to add a lot of ink which I believe will give me approximately the same general ink saturation as using the high quality setting, unless I am not seeing the bigger picture.
Has anyone else printed a wrap on High Quality? Just looking for the downsides of this option.

 

[P Wagner]

You should certainly be able to print a wrap using the High Quality (higher resolution) print mode, assuming that the media profile is well constructed and representative of your machine's current behavior set. It will likely use just a bit more ink, and certainly take longer to print, but aside from that, there should be no other downsides.

 

[CanuckSigns]

I have versaworks set up to print LAB black when it "sees" CMYK or RGB black. The results are really really good, even on standard quality, the black comes out the same darkness as the crop marks do when you print them, to give you an idea.

This can be done in the "special colours" section of versaworks, you tell versaworks what colour to "look" for and what colour it should print in it's place, the settings you input here will override the settings in whatever profile you are using, for example, if you send C0, M100, Y100, K0 it should print a nice true red, however due to ink limits in most canned profiles, it comes out slightly orange, if you put this into your special colours to actually print C0, M100, Y100, K0 you get a beautiful stop sign red, every time.