Print Quality Question

[Prairie Portable]

I've got a question about print quality. I'm new to printing as I've been outsourcing all my work up until now. I printed a billboard tonight on my cjv150 and have some horizontal lines showing. I ran media compensation and drop position adjustments. I used a 720x1080 6 pass? (I think) CMYK profile. Any idea what could cause this issue in the photo attached?

 

[unclebun]

If you don't have any nozzles out, then check your media compensation.

 

[Gino]

Not sure about the banding, but it looks like you're using the wrong profile or something. Ink shouldn't look like that on regular vinyl.

 

[Prairie Portable]

Not sure about the banding, but it looks like you're using the wrong profile or something. Ink shouldn't look like that on regular vinyl.

I am using a profile for a different vinyl than what I'm printing on as there aren't a lot of es3 profiles .I can't find one for the orajet 3621 gloss I'm printing on. I see Flexi has a profile maker I may try doing my own profile next.

 

[hand851]

Not enough heat.

 

[Prairie Portable]

Not enough heat.

I was running 35-35-45. Do you have a better recommendation?

 

[rjssigns]

If you can try running the Orajet 3640 profile. There should be one available. If that clears up the banding then dig into Rasterlink and see if you can adjust the droplet size. I had an issue on a certain file with my Mutoh and running the 3640 profile eliminated the tiny bit of banding I was seeing. Went back and adjusted the droplet size in Flexi and it's perfect.

Not real familiar with Rasterlink yet. Haven't been running the Mimaki in the lab that much.

 

[Prairie Portable]

If you can try running the Orajet 3640 profile. There should be one available. If that clears up the banding then dig into Rasterlink and see if you can adjust the droplet size. I had an issue on a certain file with my Mutoh and running the 3640 profile eliminated the tiny bit of banding I was seeing. Went back and adjusted the droplet size in Flexi and it's perfect.

Not real familiar with Rasterlink yet. Haven't been running the Mimaki in the lab that much.

Im running Flexi19. What droplet size do you have set?

 

[Jim Hancock]

The mottled look can be caused by not enough heat, too fast a print head speed for that material, or, as suggested, a mismatched profile. The light lines can be caused by media compensation allowing the media to feed too much between passes, but if you have adjusted that,
I would suggest first to run standard speed instead of high speed, and upping the heat to 38-38-45 and see if that improves things. If it does, you may then try a different profile.
If your print speed is too high and the heat too low, the following can happen. Keep in mind, the ink drops have a slight electrical charge on them. As the drops hit the vinyl, they have a tendency to spread, known as dot gain. They will also draw toward each other (like charges attract). Heat helps minimize this by causing the drop to start to dry quickly, stopping this spread. If the head speed is too fast for the particular ink-media-profile combination, then the next pass will lay down ink on top of the previous pass, which hasn't had a chance to dry enough, allowing the individual ink drops to draw toward each other, causing ink clumping, resulting in a mottled look.

Regards,
Jim Hancock

 

[rjssigns]

Im running Flexi19. What droplet size do you have set?

In the test file we ran Large droplet size.