Roland VG 540 - Inaccurate colors (Blue = purple) - Pooling - Blurry Images - Overspray

[alex_twg]

Hey there,

We use the Roland VG 540 to create digital prints at my work (mostly for t-shirts).
I am a new hire but am working on troubleshooting the printer, I have little to no experience with digital printing.

So there are 4 big problems that we are having, the first of which is that the blues are printing purple..

First I printed out a color chart to see if it was caused by how I am exporting from Illustrator but to no avail, the entire range of blues printed purple (see attached pictures).
I tried changing the color balance in Versaworks but that didn't change anything (not sure if I did this wrong since nothing changed)
I also downloaded the exact media profile from roland for the paper we are using, that produced the same results.

Just tell me if you need more specific details on any of this, like I said I have little experience.

Secondly there is heavy pooling on the purples (supposed to be blues) and reds. The last print I did there was pooling all across the board, not sure if this is a side-effect of what looks like double printing or not. I have read that I need to set limits on the different colors so they won't print more than is necessary but I don't know how to do this and I also am unsure if that's part of the issue.

Third issue is that the edges of pictures are slightly blurry, this could be caused by the overspray I am guessing. But as you can see in the Emmy nametag the compound black color is shifted slightly causing the blurry edges when looking closely, I can totally be off base though.

Fourth, as mentioned earlier this could be connected to the last issue. As you can see in the Emmy name tag print the black is overspraying onto the white, which is less than ideal. I have observed the same thing with magenta but not nearly as bad. We clean our printer regularly so I wouldn't think it's an issue with a dirty head at all.


Any assistance would be greatly appreciated with any of the aforementioned issues,

Thanks

 

[Greg Kelm]

Bi-directional alignment needs to be performed and it seems your print head is too high, creating overspray. How does your test print look? Maybe someone before you contaminated the ink or crossed the lines. A printhead test print should tell you right away.

 

[alex_twg]

I will do an alignment and lower the head then post an update. In the meantime here is our last test print, we do one every morning.

 

[ewded]

You don't have 4 problems, you have one. It's called truvis. Convince your employer to get an Epson and forget about test prints and maintenance. Seriously.

 

[Joe House]

It looks to me like your head 1 and possibly head 2 have been knocked out of alignment and need to be re-seated. You may also need to replace one or both of them. I don't think that this is affecting your color issue though, but is probably contributing to your overspray issue. It also looks like you have an encoder issue as well - clean the encoder to see if you can get some of the double printing to go away.
Finally, don't expect your print to match your monitor unless you've got some good color management going on. If you're new to this, get a tech in to look at the printer and have him train you on proper use and care.

Good Luck

 

[alex_twg]

It looks to me like your head 1 and possibly head 2 have been knocked out of alignment and need to be re-seated. You may also need to replace one or both of them. I don't think that this is affecting your color issue though, but is probably contributing to your overspray issue. It also looks like you have an encoder issue as well - clean the encoder to see if you can get some of the double printing to go away.
Finally, don't expect your print to match your monitor unless you've got some good color management going on. If you're new to this, get a tech in to look at the printer and have him train you on proper use and care.

Good Luck

I have lowered the print head and also performed the bi-directional alignment, the overspray issue is gone and the double printing issue is also absent.

All I have left is the color being out of whack.

I don't expect my monitor to match the color of the printer (we don't have color accurate monitors even) but I do expect that the (100% blue) on the color chart to be blue instead of purple :/

Thanks for all the assistance so far! It has helped a lot.

 

[Greg Kelm]

Find a bigger pantone chart (or several) online and save it to a safe place. Print it on all the materials you will be using at the shop and use it for spot color reference. You can pick a color from the printed chart and use the file to find the correct color read-out. What you see on monitor will most likely never match the printer unless you spend some $$$

 

[alex_twg]

Find a bigger pantone chart (or several) online and save it to a safe place. Print it on all the materials you will be using at the shop and use it for spot color reference. You can pick a color from the printed chart and use the file to find the correct color read-out. What you see on monitor will most likely never match the printer unless you spend some $$$

This would work except a lot of our stuff is not in vector form, many people come in and send images to us that are raster so I can't convert them to spot colors.

 

[SignMeUpGraphics]

What happens if you change rendering intent to Density Control Only?

 

[alex_twg]

What happens if you change rendering intent to Density Control Only?

Same purple is printed for the blues. Just tried using Density Control Only.

EDIT: Also, how do you check the shot count? I googled it and I can't find anything.

EDIT 2: Should I consider a factory reset?

 

[ewded]

It looks to me like your head 1 and possibly head 2 have been knocked out of alignment and need to be re-seated. You may also need to replace one or both of them. I don't think that this is affecting your color issue though, but is probably contributing to your overspray issue. It also looks like you have an encoder issue as well - clean the encoder to see if you can get some of the double printing to go away.
Finally, don't expect your print to match your monitor unless you've got some good color management going on. If you're new to this, get a tech in to look at the printer and have him train you on proper use and care.

Good Luck

What about head 3 and 4 ?

 

[Mascitti Bro]

Find a bigger pantone chart (or several) online and save it to a safe place. Print it on all the materials you will be using at the shop and use it for spot color reference. You can pick a color from the printed chart and use the file to find the correct color read-out. What you see on monitor will most likely never match the printer unless you spend some $$$

I've learned with our VG540 that the color shown on the screen is typically 2 to 3 shades lighter than the true color. (that's when I refer to my printed-out color chart. I always seem to put my mind at ease once I see the color on the chart, as i'm now trained myself to know that's the color it will come out as in the end.)

 

[Joe House]

What about head 3 and 4 ?

Good Catch - I went back and looked and yes, I can see a little shift in 4 and a slighter shift in 3. It's not as obvious as 1 and 2 though (and a picture is never as good as the actual print). With all of them having some shift, I would do the bias alignment - which is done on the full carriage and then reseat any heads that still show a shift. There is a test print in the service menu that shows the error much better than the nozzle test print.

 

[alex_twg]

Good Catch - I went back and looked and yes, I can see a little shift in 4 and a slighter shift in 3. It's not as obvious as 1 and 2 though (and a picture is never as good as the actual print). With all of them having some shift, I would do the bias alignment - which is done on the full carriage and then reseat any heads that still show a shift. There is a test print in the service menu that shows the error much better than the nozzle test print.

The fuzziness, overspray, and misalignment are fixed now. I just did all the calibrations on the machine that I could.
Last step is to solve the blues.

 

[jakesworld]

The VG Truvis compared to the Roland Ecosolmax inks print way different than whats on screen, the Truvis is a few shades off on screen & most the blues are very purple, the old ecosol max, was at least closer to what you saw on screen. The ecosol max had alot more array of colors on the color chart, the truvis alot of the colors look the same & not even close to the array of colors..

 

[hand851]

Hey there,

We use the Roland VG 540 to create digital prints at my work (mostly for t-shirts).
I am a new hire but am working on troubleshooting the printer, I have little to no experience with digital printing.

So there are 4 big problems that we are having, the first of which is that the blues are printing purple..

First I printed out a color chart to see if it was caused by how I am exporting from Illustrator but to no avail, the entire range of blues printed purple (see attached pictures).
I tried changing the color balance in Versaworks but that didn't change anything (not sure if I did this wrong since nothing changed)
I also downloaded the exact media profile from roland for the paper we are using, that produced the same results.

Just tell me if you need more specific details on any of this, like I said I have little experience.

Secondly there is heavy pooling on the purples (supposed to be blues) and reds. The last print I did there was pooling all across the board, not sure if this is a side-effect of what looks like double printing or not. I have read that I need to set limits on the different colors so they won't print more than is necessary but I don't know how to do this and I also am unsure if that's part of the issue.

Third issue is that the edges of pictures are slightly blurry, this could be caused by the overspray I am guessing. But as you can see in the Emmy nametag the compound black color is shifted slightly causing the blurry edges when looking closely, I can totally be off base though.

Fourth, as mentioned earlier this could be connected to the last issue. As you can see in the Emmy name tag print the black is overspraying onto the white, which is less than ideal. I have observed the same thing with magenta but not nearly as bad. We clean our printer regularly so I wouldn't think it's an issue with a dirty head at all.


Any assistance would be greatly appreciated with any of the aforementioned issues,

Thanks