Need Help with Printing High-Quality Button Designs

[SLShop]

I need to print small round images of a designer's artwork for an artist. She uses them to make buttons. The images are 4x4 cm in size and are not vector files but very large pixel graphics. However, I can't achieve a good print quality; it always turns out very blurry despite being set to 4000 dpi and printed at 4x4 cm. I'm using a brand-new Epson 40600 printer. Does anyone have any tips for me?

 

[victor bogdanov]

a desktop photo printer will be better quality than a wide format printer for stuff like that.

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[Goatshaver]

I'd think if you were printing 8pass or 12pass unidirectional you should be able to get a really nice print. I do small stuff like that all the time with my S40. The design must be pretty intricate.

 

[SLShop]

I'd think if you were printing 8pass or 12pass unidirectional you should be able to get a really nice print. I do small stuff like that all the time with my S40. The design must be pretty intricate.

The print was done with 16-pass uni directly over Epson Edge Print. I tried different profiles, but it looks the same every time. I generally get a grainy result with the S40 for too bright designs. The media is calibrated. nozzle 100% fine

 

[netsol]

If i am understanding correctly, the graininess comes from using a CMYK,printer.
the colors that would be rendered with lc & lm ink are printed with whitespace around the pixels.
a CMYKlclm printer would look much less grainly

higher resolution is not going to help
perhaps you can tweak spot colors & get acceptable results?

 

[victor bogdanov]

If i am understanding correctly, the graininess comes from using a CMYK,printer.
the colors that would be rendered with lc & lm ink are printed with whitespace around the pixels.
a CMYKlclm printer would look much less grainly

higher resolution is not going to help
perhaps you can tweak spot colors & get acceptable results?

Yea that's why the photo printers use 10+ colors. Virtually 0 grain

 

[VizualVoice]

The print was done with 16-pass uni directly over Epson Edge Print. I tried different profiles, but it looks the same every time. I generally get a grainy result with the S40 for too bright designs. The media is calibrated. nozzle 100% fine

what media is that? It almost looks like the results one gets when trying to use uncoated media with incompatible ink.

 

[SLShop]

This is a blueback paper film from Emblem. I tried printing the design larger as a test, and it looks significantly better, but it is still grainy, especially on the face and dress. Is this simply the maximum that a 4-color printer can achieve?

 

[Johnny Best]

How do you get her design on to your computer to send to RIP and print? Show the original design they send you. Is it a .pdf, jpeg, tiff, or some other form.

 

[victor bogdanov]

Here is how a small sticker looks printed on my Colorado, this is is 1" x 2" , photos make it look worse than it is and from normal viewing distance the sticker looks great and customer is happy. but the lighter colors are grainy

I have had customers in the past not happy because before they were ordering stickers printed on 9+ color printers such as the 80600 or Rolands and the 4 color looks horrible (grainy) in comparison

Light blue / pink small stickers I print on Epson R5070 because the LC and LM inks really make those colors less grainy.

 

[bob]

Garbage in, garbage out. If whatever it is you're using for input is functionally low resolution, so will be your output. Jacking up the print resolution on a crappy bitmap will do little to nothing to fix the problem. Likewise, increasing the resolution of a bitmap of dubious quality is equally futile. You need to do whatever you can to produce a high quality input file and not waste your time trying to find some magic collection of printer settings that will make everything just right. There aren't any.

You might have a go at running the input file through an AI engine such as Gigapixel, PhotoZoom, etc. and try to produce a 150ppi image where each pixel is not a part of a larger collective pixel or, more precisely, a large pseudo-pixel. Always keep in mind that in order to reduce a bitmap's size you have to discard information. In order to enlarge a bitmap you have to create new information. A decent AI engine does this sort of thing quite well. If you do manage to produce an acceptable bitmap then print it at 720dpi and all will be well. Printing at more than four times the input resolution doesn't hurt anything but is a waste of time. 4x plus or minus is the optimum ratio.

 

[netsol]

what media is that? It almost looks like the results one gets when trying to use uncoated media with incompatible ink.

well, there certainly could be more than one reason it doesn't look right

 

[richsweeney]

I think the lines per si is a bit low. I am not sure you can do anything about it with a wide format printer as the print droplets are larger. If you have access to a commercial digital printer, like a konica or xerox, it may look better, (1200 or 2400 dpi ) The sample looks normal for a wide format printer. We have both types of machines, and wide format HP. And we print buttons on both types of machines. The laser look much better, but the normal market (not artists) don't notice. Also for artists I hope you are charging at least 4x your normal rate, unless you are doing this for a friend.