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AdriaticBlue · February 21st, 2008

I've seen this word when reading about printers & cutters, not sure what it means or more importantly, how to recognize it.

Can someone educate me?

Thanks!

AB

prometheus · February 21st, 2008

This occurs in inkjet printing when one or more of the heads are clogged. It will produce bands of varying color. It can also happen in regular printing with gradients. Instead of a nice smooth gradient between colors, you may see steps of banded color.

AdriaticBlue · February 21st, 2008

Ok - So, this would only apply in the world of cutters when someone has a printer/cutter-in-one, not just on a cutter only.

Makes sense, thank you!

AB

DAGuide · February 21st, 2008

To expand upon what Robert said, banding can occur in a couple of different manners when using any type of inkjet printer (i.e. inkjet transfers, dye sublimation, dtg printing, large format printing,...). Banding is horizontal stripes that are visible in the print that should not be there and ususally occurs in three ways:

#1 - The stepper motor (which feeds the paper or substrate under the printhead) does not move the item far enough between each horizontal pass of the printhead. Thus, each pass of ink will slightly overlap of ink (because there is too much ink in a specific spot) and cause a dark horizantal band running across the print. To correct this, you really need to fix the amount of movement from one pass to the other...but you might be able to minimize it by dropping down in resolution.

#2 - The profile used to control the amount of ink the printer drops is not done properly and you see light horizontal banding lines that run across the print. If you try to increase the resolution, you might see this type of banding either go away or become less noticable...but you might begin to oversaturate your colors.

#3 - Banding can occur because some of the nozzles of the printer are not properly firing (i.e. clogged) and thus you are not dropping enough ink down. Always run a nozzle check to see if this is the case. If so, runs some cleanings or follow your manufacturers recommendation as to how to unclog the nozzles.

Banding is generally more noticeable when printing vector graphics because you have larger blocks of color that the banding strips are more noticeable. Raster graphics tend to be a little more forgiving with banding.

Hope this helps.

Mark

DAGuide · February 21st, 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by AdriaticBlue


	Ok - So, this would only apply in the world of cutters when someone has a printer/cutter-in-one, not just on a cutter only.

It would also apply to anyone that was doing print-cut with a separate printer and an optical eye registration cutter. Banding would be specific to the printing part of the process.