I Had an interesting case this week where I had a request to emulate a 500 Series Latex
Printer with a 1500 and a 3200 industrial latex printers.
And they've had a lot of success, with adhesive vinyl, with banner, with front lit films.
But they were trying to do it with fabric.
And when they went into the workflow on the 500, it said "NA".
Let me explain how this works.
When you load a fabric into a 500 series, or for that matter a 300 series,
and you have the ink collectors in, because the fabric is porous.
Now keep in mind, you only have to put the ink collectors in if the fabric is porous.
If the fabric is coated or airtight, you do not need to apply the ink collectors.
But if the fab, fabric is porous, you do.
So, if you have the in collectors in and you've chosen textile as your category,
the color calibration and the ICC will both be listed as NA, or not applicable or not available.
What we're saying is once you put that in, color calibration of the on-board i1 is not
available because we do not believe it's going to be reliable or accurate enough to read that application.
Also, even if you have the platens, the ink collectors out and have the flat platen in,
and you were to choose uncoated textile, it will also say NA in both cases, for the same reason.
It assumes that if you're running a, an uncoated textile, an uncoated fabric,
the i1's reliability would be called into question,
and even if we allowed you to read it, the readings wouldn't be valid or wouldn't be consistent.
That's why when you choose that category, it locks you out.
That means that it is difficult to do a calibration using the onboard system on the 500 where
you're going to use it to emulate for the 1500 or the 3000 because you can't do the color calibration on board.
You would have to do it in the RIP.
It would have to be done in ONYX, or in Caldera.
You'd have to remember your density settings, and then over time, you would adjust your density,
uh, for each ink channel accordingly,
so that you match what you did on day one when you built the preset.
I'm gonna explain a little work around.
In some cases, certain fabrics that are airtight or fabrics that are coated,
or even some high-quality uncoated fabrics,
I have used a workflow where I tell the fabric, You are not a textile.
You are not an uncoated textile.
You are an adhesive vinyl backlit.
Or you are a vivid PVC banner.
In those cases, I'm permitted to use the onboard color calibration with higher ink densities.
Let me give you an example.
If I have a canvas, and I want to put more than 120 percent density down.
Now in the normal channel where you would build a preset for canvas,
you would choose coated textile and canvas.
But it's only going to allow you to print up to 120 percent density at 12 pass.
Well, if I feel that my canvas would benefit from 130 percent density or 150 percent density,
I can't choose that category.
In my case, I will call it a vivid PVC banner.
Canvas will perform a lot like banner anyway.
Now you can call a media a different category.
You have to remember two things.
One, where you put it.
And second, you have to remember that the settings for that category might be a little different.
You may have a different vacuum setting.
The cutter may be on or off.
You may have some different settings with your starting, uh, print speeds and or temperatures.
But you can adjust those.
What I'm saying is, it's possible to call a canvas "banner", make some adjustments in the settings.
Like I would turn up the Optimizer, generally, and then choose a vivid mode or a backlit mode.
And it may permit you to use the on-board i1 calibration as well as even the ICC.
For me, I generally call canvas that I want to go over 120 percent, provided that's necessary
and you can judge that based upon the individual canvas and then look (inaudible) analysis
and determine is my color gamut getting affectively (inaudible) or not.
But if there's value to going to 130 or 150 percent density on a canvas, and I think
there is, then I would choose a different path rather than the PVC,
the, uh, the coated textile and canvas under textile.
And I would call it a banner, a vivid banner, because that's going to give me 130 and 150 and 170 as options.
And it's going to use the onboard color calibration and that once I do that it
will refer to it on a regular basis and that will make it a consistent color.
There's advantages there.
Now I'm going to turn the Optimizer up and more importantly, I may need to slow it down.
Twelve pass may not be ideal, I might have to go to 16 pass
or I might do 12 pass with significant inter-pass delays.
But I prefer that work space and that category choice because I want to use the onboard color calibration.
It's important for me to use that so that I can maintain color consistency.
Now on some irregular canvases, especially matte canvases or have a lot of calendered surface,
the on board i1 could struggle reading because of the irregular surface.
There is a point where the on board i1 and the distance it is, and the way it's built, isn't going to be ideal.
And that's why for example, we chose to block that out and make it not available in those fabric,
uh, settings, because we didn't feel that it would be effective.
It would either read erroneously or it would just try and try and fail.
Uh, If it tried to read it and it can't, and it's, you know, it says was unable to read
or it doesn't go from, uh, generic to custom, it doesn't go from recommended to OK, it may mean that it can't see it
or the, the readings that it's getting are irrational, and so therefore, it throws it out.
But I have used both the SAV and the PVC banner for fabrics
and canvases where I do wish to use the onboard color calibration at a minimum.
Now I may go into Caldera, ONYX or Flexi and build my ICC profile.
But I do like to do, if I can, the on-board closed loop, closed-loop calibration because
that allows me to maintain consistent color.
And that would also allow me to benefit from doing
emulations from a 500 series to the larger industrial latex printers.
It really depends on the fabric.
Some of them actually work quite well, um, especially coated fabrics.
And I want to put more ink on them than 120 percent in most cases for coated fabrics.
So, I tend to call them either a banner and change the settings,
or I call them a backlit SAV and I change the settings.
But please, you have to remember, you got to change the settings.
In both of those cases, you will have to put the flat platen on.
You cannot ever use the ink collectors because that automatically triggers the printer to say you're,
pl, printing on porous material and we can't read it.
So, if you put the ink collectors in, it's no.
But if you put the flat platens in and then call it adhesive vinyl or call it,
um, I'll sometimes use vivid banner for certain coated fabrics, print at 150 percent instead of 120,
and I benefit from having the closed-loop calibration available,
which most of the time on a coated fabric will work just fine.
Just some work-arounds that I wanted to explain.
Hopefully it wasn't too complicated.
But to explain how the 500 works, how the different categories that we build things in work,
and then a, a work-around that can be effective.
But you're going to have to look at the fabric and,
and evaluate it individually to determine if that fabric has reliability using the onboard i1.
If it does, I do like to tend to use it.
I think it's a, it's a great tool and it allows me to record the densities for color calibration,
closed loop calibration, and then also to emulate with the larger printers.
But even as a stand-alone, I think it has a lot of value.