Oracal should be fine but you do get bad rolls once in a while. Unfortunately, specifically on the CJV30, towards the end of the manufacturing the Y-bars were coming out of China bent slightly which is enough to affect the print. If your media comp looks good on one end but not good on the other, either the head slant alignment hasn't been done or you got one of the bad Y-bars and there is nothing you can do to fix it. Hopefully it's the head slant that is off. If that's not the case then I would blame the ink. ES3 inks are just not as good at making solid prints as the SS21 which is why there aren't nearly as many people running ES3.