jayhawksigns
New Member
We have been long time, since 1996, Summa users. On our second cutter and have a DC4sx in house as well. For anyone who has owned one, you know what I mean when nothing else will do. The unfortunate thing for us it that we never had a tech/rep in house to show us all of the neat little tricks that you need to know to fully take advantage of your Summa, I just found out something today and I thought I would share it just in case it might help someone else. Add you little known secrets too if you have one.
Use the OPOS Barcode option
First, if you are cutting batches of stickers and have a rip solution that takes advantage of the OPOS Barcode option, literally stop right now and figure this out. This wasn't my revelation from today, but it saves so much time. If you are already using the XY option to print the extra alignment bar along the front edge of a print you won't be using any additional media, but having the cutter go through say a batch of 25 stickers, and then realign itself for another 25 basically makes it a click and forget workflow. No matter how good the Summa tracking is, I don't like doing a long run of intricate decals, it just will get off. Breaking it down into smaller groups that you run multiple copies of allows the plotter to basically reset itself on its own to keep its accuracy up over the length of the entire job. In case someone from Summa sees this, add this to your own software for printing though our DC4sx using ColorControl and then cutting after laminating in WinPlot.
Where you scan the OPOS Barcode makes a difference
This is my new little nugget. One of our customers usually orders a mixed size of decals on a single order. Each size is printed separately and sometimes the actual barcode doesn't end up in the same place on the print. Even though the cutter says to put the cutter below the barcode, putting it anywhere below the alignment line will give you the same result. So place it near the middle of the media rather then the right edge when you load the barcode and it will sense the next barcode in line, no matter how wide the next job is. When the cutter is running through OPOS jobs it kind of doesn't like it when it can't find the next barcode, this helps alleviate that issue.
Our Summas have been great, and I won't have another cutter in our shop. But they are capable of a lot and it sadly took me more then a few years to learn these two workflow practices.
Use the OPOS Barcode option
First, if you are cutting batches of stickers and have a rip solution that takes advantage of the OPOS Barcode option, literally stop right now and figure this out. This wasn't my revelation from today, but it saves so much time. If you are already using the XY option to print the extra alignment bar along the front edge of a print you won't be using any additional media, but having the cutter go through say a batch of 25 stickers, and then realign itself for another 25 basically makes it a click and forget workflow. No matter how good the Summa tracking is, I don't like doing a long run of intricate decals, it just will get off. Breaking it down into smaller groups that you run multiple copies of allows the plotter to basically reset itself on its own to keep its accuracy up over the length of the entire job. In case someone from Summa sees this, add this to your own software for printing though our DC4sx using ColorControl and then cutting after laminating in WinPlot.
Where you scan the OPOS Barcode makes a difference
This is my new little nugget. One of our customers usually orders a mixed size of decals on a single order. Each size is printed separately and sometimes the actual barcode doesn't end up in the same place on the print. Even though the cutter says to put the cutter below the barcode, putting it anywhere below the alignment line will give you the same result. So place it near the middle of the media rather then the right edge when you load the barcode and it will sense the next barcode in line, no matter how wide the next job is. When the cutter is running through OPOS jobs it kind of doesn't like it when it can't find the next barcode, this helps alleviate that issue.
Our Summas have been great, and I won't have another cutter in our shop. But they are capable of a lot and it sadly took me more then a few years to learn these two workflow practices.
