Banding on neg

[Raúl Aragón]

Hi, here a question to those who have printed many meters of digital negs. I'm printing from a 17 inches Pictorico roll with an Epson P5300, and Im getting random banding lines printing head oriented (To me looks very much like a feed issue) I've performed head and feed alignment, without much success, then I'increased drying time to 1 second, platen gap to widest, print quality to highest and slowest, back tension to normal, suction 0. But I'm still getting banding. Any suggestions? before I give up on digital negs

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

Are you printing bi or uni?

 

[Raúl Aragón]

I'm printing uni, but in this case bi or uni don't change my results, and the printer is only 6 months old, I'tested printing gradients and solid blacks in the solid blacks its even worse, my last guess would be the paper feed encoder perhaps?

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

You've done head alignments, but have you done them manually, too?

 

[koraks]

Welcome to the wonderful world of inkjet negatives. Banding can happen. Sometimes it doesn't.
What might help is to use a different curve configuration; QTR gives you the best options to control this. Depending on the curves used my printer can make fairly clean negatives or ones that show considerable banding. The problem is that the different channels on the inkjet head never align perfectly. It's not needed in the intended application (regular prints) so printer manufacturers don't bother fixing it.

 

[fgorga]

Hi, here a question to those who have printed many meters of digital negs. I'm printing from a 17 inches Pictorico roll with an Epson P5300, and Im getting random banding lines printing head oriented (To me looks very much like a feed issue) I've performed head and feed alignment, without much success, then I'increased drying time to 1 second, platen gap to widest, print quality to highest and slowest, back tension to normal, suction 0. But I'm still getting banding. Any suggestions? before I give up on digital negs

Have you also done a nozzle check? Clogged nozzles can show up as banding.

Have you tried using a cut sheet instead of the roll?

I imagine that the printer must overcome some drag in pulling material off of the roll compared to feeding a sheet. This might cause problems. Beware though... The last two sentences are complete conjuncture on my part.