The sublimation printer is printing images with obvious stripes across them that are not in the original image. Also one corner is regularly crumpling and being covered with black ink
@mendezr and I are scheduled to teach a sublimation class to kids next month. Cleaning the heads did not fix this problem last time, I don’t know what else to do. Please help
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I’ll take a look today or tomorrow and figure out what’s going on.
Of note, if one does a “power clean” (I think it’s called) the printer warns about needing to wait 12hours before using the printer. The cleaning pushes a lot of ink into the spittoon. The 12 hour wait is to allow the ink in the spittoon to dry so it doesn’t end up slopping onto things and getting onto the paper during a print.
I did notice that curling edge that’s getting caught somewhere during the print. I’ll see if I can find what’s in the paper path and causing problems.
Last, just to double check are you printing with “best” or high quality or whatever the driver calls it? I doubt that’s entirely what’s going on ofc, but might improve things.
Thanks Brian!
I haven’t seen the “best” setting, and will look next time I give it a try. But I also have printed good images with that printer without changing any settings like that
With the printer set to paper type “Plain Paper” we definitely get some lines in the print. Not as bad as what your example shows with actual holidays in the printed output though. The spacing between the lines looks to be too large to be the printhead though (I’m not however going to stake my life on that, it’s absolutely possible that just printing more opened up the clogged nozzle).
However, I’ve always used paper type “Presentation Paper Matte” in the driver and print quality “High” which results in a lot more ink on the page. Note that a print will take considerably longer than with the paper set to “Plain Paper”.
Last, I did a sublimation test on a spare blank. The transfer itself helps smooth things out so light variations aren’t particularly noticeable (although certainly are when compared side-to-side.)
So, that’s not to say “it’ll probably be fine”, bc I think those lines definitely would have been in your finished piece. If changing the paper setting doesn’t do the trick, we might need to see if it happens when I print that same file to figure out where in the chain the problem is.
If you can, try these setting changes and see if it helps.
For the corner of the paper / ink splotches: There was a stack of sublimation paper that had gotten mucked up in the corner… juuuuuuust enough that the print head could snag it and then it could ride against the dirty parts of the printhead. I stuck new unadulterated paper in the printer and I didn’t have that problem at all today (but have had it happen regularly in the past, so i’m pretty confident in the culprit.) Taking as deep a look as I could without having to disassemble too much, I didn’t find anything in the paper path that would cause the corner to kink.
