Black ink bleeds into other colors

Hey All,

We are (and have been for some time) having problems with our blacks and other dark colors bleeding into our lighter colors. Picture included. First it started happening with the Oracal 3165 Profile (This is the media being used) then we ditched that profile and went with the HP Air release Cast vinyl profile, worked good for a while, but now it's starting to happen again. If you print black or ther dark colors on their own, no problem... But if your against another color the black is almost drawn into the other color and causes a fuzzy haze. We've had a lot of service on this machine.... It's like an old English sprots car... Works great when it's up, but seems to be in the garage a lot. Any help would be greatly appreciated... Also, If I want to delete a corrupt profile and relace it with a new one, how do I do it?

Mike

HI Susanne,

Here you have some recommendations in order to solve your issues:

1- Do the automatic printhead alignment.

2- Clean the optimizer printhead.

3- Decrease the ink amount.

4- Increase the amount of optimizer (check pages 106 -108 of the User Guide)

Please let me know if these recommendation helped you.

Mey Marc,

Thanks for your reply...

We have tried these procedures in the past with no luck. I t seems for some reason to be a profile issue. We worked with our Oracal 3165 profile on 3165 substrate for a year and a half with no problem, then it all of a sudden started bleeding dark colors into lighter ones. After a ton of back and fourth with HP we decided it was a corrupt profile. We changed to the HP Air Release Cast vinyl profile for the 3165 substrate and everything was fine, except for the color shift, but we proceeded with the new profile. Now that HP profile is starting to bleed in the dark areas. The profile seems to fail over time, which seems crazy. This problem exists over several substrates when those certain profiles are used. Of course, we've been using these profiles for over a year now so to abandon them at this point makes it tough to keep consistent colors through out our printing. Hopefully this info helps. The problem I have with our service calls is that the techs are real good at breaking the printer down and putting it back together, but they really don't have answers for quality issues...

Mike

Hi Mike,

The only thing that comes to my mind that could be causing this could be the an environmental change due to the winter, since we've seen some cases in which some printers change their behaviour during cold months. If my previous recommendations didn't work at all I can only recommend you to ask your support source to make sure that everything is correct wit your printer.

Please keep me updated.

I have the same problem from a while - Did you find the solution for this ?

Hello @wimage

There are no further suggest but the ones Marc Magrans explained above. If you keep having this issue please call your support services.

I'm necroing an old thread, but how about a dead optimizer head?

Yes, we resolved the issue. We made a new profile with more passes. We learned that if you increase the number of passes it slows down the printing process, but gives the optimizer a bit more time to do its thing and keep the ink from bleeding. This has been a fail-proof discovery. Any time we get bleeding on different profiles we have added an option for more passes. It lays down the same amount of ink, only slower. Yes, it does increase your printing time, but at the end of the day it's all about the product and you can't send out prints that are bleeding.

We had the same issue, and changed the optimizer head and it went away, hope this helps.

@Susanne

What you’re describing is effectively a workaround for a dead optimizer head.