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Weird Banding in certain colors?

SIGNTIME

SIGNTIME

New Member
I have run into this a few times, I seem to get strange banding in certain colors. This time it's pantone 7680c or R 82, G 49, B 120. Our printer is a Soljet XJ540 Pro3. Feed cal is good and heat settings are ok, there is also black being printed in the same file and has zero banding and looks good. I was wondering if anyone with a pro 3 could run a block of the above color and see if they get the same results. I'm printing on 3551 with Oracal's profile. When this has come up in the past we have tried different profiles, heat settings, color management settings, printing with the closest cmyk, rgb, or spot colors, none of which cured the problem. Is this just something that we have to live with with certain colors?
 

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player

New Member
I would print larger blocks (12" x 50") of pure C Y M K and see what that yields.

How do you know the dampers are good?
 
R

Ragnabrok

New Member
those bands are really consistant, head alignment looks suspect, or at least the bi-directional part of it.

Printing the same thing, only in uni-directional, does it give this result? an easy troubleshoot before you bother with head alignment anyway.
 
SIGNTIME

SIGNTIME

New Member
The dampners are original to the machine, 5 years old. Have had a tech in here recently working on the machine (different issue), tech said the dampners are fine. But I guess we can't completly rule out the possibility that they aren't. Will try uni-directional shortly, but have had similar issues with other colors (most recently a dark green) uni-directional made no differnce then though.

The banding we are getting now is very consistent About every 1" you can see a very defined lighter color stripe.
 
P

player

New Member
The test print looks really clean.

I would do the calibrations, then print the coloured blocks to see if any heads are starved for ink, or if the banding shows up in one particular colour.

A damper can be partially clogged, allowing for perfect test print but starves it when printing full out.

I think it is a calibration issue at this point though.
 
SIGNTIME

SIGNTIME

New Member
Ok so I printed in uni-directional with good results. I then checked the bi-directional settings and 4 out of 16 were off slightly, I made the adjustments and tried to print the same test file in bi-directional. The print got a little better. I then went into service mode and did a bunch of test prints and everything looked good except the horizontal. I made the horizontal adjustments and test printed again in bi-directional and it look a lot better but not perfect so I checked my feed cal which I never checked after making the bi-directional and horizontal adjustments, it was off by .30 so I adjusted and reprinted and the banding came back? I tried uni-directional again and it looked good. I'm starting to think I should just replace all 6 dampners because the banding seems to go away when I spent 45 minutes checking settings but comes back when printing a couple of patches of the color, wierd thing is that when it's banding it starts right away not half way through the print? It seems like ink starvation in the sense that I can get it to print good in bi-directional right after the printer sits for a little while on the first couple of test 24"x6" of the color, then it comes back after a few. Printing the file in uni-directional produces good right after. Maybe the ink can keep up with the extra time between passes in uni-directional?

Sorry if that is confusing. Any thoughts? When ink starvation is present, wouldn't gradually get worse the longer you print?
 
G

greysquirrel

New Member
Have you run this on another media? Or at least another roll of same media type? It might be a good idea to try another roll before calling in a tech.
It does look like feed calibration from your picture. What is the quality/pass mode? Deep purples and reflex blues have to be run slower on certain medias.
 
K

Karen-Kang

New Member
SIGNTIME said:
Ok so I printed in uni-directional with good results. I then checked the bi-directional settings and 4 out of 16 were off slightly, I made the adjustments and tried to print the same test file in bi-directional. The print got a little better. I then went into service mode and did a bunch of test prints and everything looked good except the horizontal. I made the horizontal adjustments and test printed again in bi-directional and it look a lot better but not perfect so I checked my feed cal which I never checked after making the bi-directional and horizontal adjustments, it was off by .30 so I adjusted and reprinted and the banding came back? I tried uni-directional again and it looked good. I'm starting to think I should just replace all 6 dampners because the banding seems to go away when I spent 45 minutes checking settings but comes back when printing a couple of patches of the color, wierd thing is that when it's banding it starts right away not half way through the print? It seems like ink starvation in the sense that I can get it to print good in bi-directional right after the printer sits for a little while on the first couple of test 24"x6" of the color, then it comes back after a few. Printing the file in uni-directional produces good right after. Maybe the ink can keep up with the extra time between passes in uni-directional?

Sorry if that is confusing. Any thoughts? When ink starvation is present, wouldn't gradually get worse the longer you print?
Click to expand...

Horizontal banding usually belong to the ink supply system parts problem.If your dampers are long time not to replaced, you can replace the particular banding color to check.
 
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