Discuss the various aspects of direct to garment printing. DTG printers include Brother, T-Jet, Flexi-Jet, DTG Kiosk, Kornit, Mimaki, Tex-Jet and others! Discuss and learn about this up and coming printing technology.
We are having a rather odd problem with our Blazer Pro. When printing white ink, the images or lettering at the start of the head travel (closest to the capping station) is always less dense and is blurry or fuzzy-edged, but on the far end of head travel the ink is stronger and clearly focused. This problem has been slowly getting worse in the past couple of weeks.
We've checked print head height at both ends of the head travel and it's consistent (about 3 millimeters). CMYK inks do not seem to exhibit this problem, only the white. We've done a power clean to ensure the white channels are clear, and the nozzle check looks ok (although not quite perfect).
Does anyone have suggestions as to what might be happening? This is becoming a print quality issue for us.
Are you sure that you are pre-treating evenly from top to bottom, and heat pressing properly? Sounds funny, but I bet it isnt a machine issue...but a pretreatment one!
Thanks for the hints! We did examine the pretreatment and it seems fine. The 'fuzziness' looks more like the ink nozzles are firing at the wrong time. I'm willing to bet it's not just white ink that's fuzzy but because we use so much of it, it masks possible errors in the CMYK inks as well.
After searching this forum last evening (which I should have done more thoroughly earlier), I discovered a suggestion that perhaps the encoder strip is dirty at the capping station end of head travel. The printer is developing a slight coating of ink mist around the inside despite the exhaust fans, so it's possible we need to more thoroughly clean the strip, perhaps more than once per day. That ink mist gets everywhere, and we've been keeping the printer very busy these days.
I've asked the US Screen folks if it's possible to also safely clean the encoder sensor, since it's a good bet that some of the stray mist has gotten into it.
We'll be printing again later today and should find out if this is the problem.
Whoops, sorry thats what I meant before, the encoder strip. get some alchohol wipes and gently wipe away the ink deposits, very easy to do and ifyou dont wipe hard its very safe as well.
Worse comes to worse you just replace the encoder strip. Cheapest part about the DTG machine, should be less then $20
It was indeed a dirty encoder strip, and it makes sense that the capping station end would be worse than the opposite end, since more printing (and spitting in the spit cup) takes place there, especially when you use Printer Jockey each morning to keep the white ink flowing.
A thorough cleaning of the strip with several alcohol pads seems to have made a big difference. A helpful hint about cleaning the sensor itself came from US Screen ... carefully "floss" thru it with an alcohol pad to clean the sensor windows.
The cause? .... I discovered that one of the exhaust fan connectors was intermittent, and two of the three fans were not running. This caused an abnormally high amount of ink mist to collect inside the printer case. That's fixed.
Blurry or fuzzy white ink 
