This can happen whether it's cal or cast. Oracal seems to have changed many things, including the adhesive (horrible smelling - we've had to stop using their 210 series laminates and several vinyls). I don't know what happened to them but really close to done with all of their materials. Sucks because we still have and use LOTS of their cut vinyls as well as print materials.It’s calendered so this can happen.
This can happen whether it's cal or cast. Oracal seems to have changed many things, including the adhesive (horrible smelling - we've had to stop using their 210 series laminates and several vinyls). I don't know what happened to them but really close to done with all of their materials. Sucks because we still have and use LOTS of their cut vinyls as well as print materials.
We use nothing but Orafol and a few 3M products, namely lots of 210 and 290 laminates and I haven't noticed any weird smell. Matter of fact, I've always liked Orafol products because they have always been about the least smelly of any of the products I've used over the years. Is this a VERY recent thing? Most of our media and laminates can't be much older than a couple months.
As far as contamination, we no longer us 3551RA so I have no recent experience with it in particular. The only problem I've ever had is invisible contamination on the first yard or two on new rolls of pretty much any of their print media. It only becomes evident when you print on it, producing random smudgy spots. I assume this to be somewhat normal, possibly due to handling.
This can happen whether it's cal or cast. Oracal seems to have changed many things, including the adhesive (horrible smelling - we've had to stop using their 210 series laminates and several vinyls). I don't know what happened to them but really close to done with all of their materials. Sucks because we still have and use LOTS of their cut vinyls as well as print materials.
WOW I can't believe no one else experiences the smell, mainly 210 Gloss and Matte, and several intermediate colored vinyls. I've posted on here before about it. We refer to it as "hot dog-sh!t", as it smells like when you step on a lawn cigar on a hot summer day. It's bad out of the box, and really bad when loading on the laminator and running it.