LASER PRINTING – CUT MARKS

[Alan Drury]

Not sure what a sp-300 is but could you manually create the marks, put into position and save a template? What software do you use?
Alan

[Lorraine Buchan]

Your cutter will need to have an optical eye to read the marks.

You can do it manually by giving your image a border of say 5mm which you print out along with your image. Set your cutter with a cut baorder of 5mm and then load the laser print into the machine and line the blade up with the corner of your boarder box.

It’s not 100% accurate but it does work, I have done this for CL sticker media from the magic touch, printed the stickers via the laser with the border box then loaded up and and contour cut them out.

[jkape]

SP-300 is rolands versacamm which has an optical eye…the thing I dont know is what type of marks it can read..As for software I would have to use CorelDraw, I would prefer Illustrator but I haven’t seen an option to do regmarks on it. Corel has its own print window where you can tell it to print cut/reg marks. I will try the box method Loraine I think I know what you mean ….I ll have a go.
Thank you

[Lorraine Buchan]

Xpres use a Roland Camm-1 with optical eye, to contour cut sublimation printed graphics. The software they use is Corel draw and they have 3 circles of black which are on a template – i don’t think there is anything special to it.

The optical eye will only work if the readings can be sent back to the computer, your plotter needs to be able to “talk” to the computer to tell it where the reg marks are. It can only do this if the connecting cable can transfer data in both directions. ….. this is where i’m not sure, I am of the understanding that a serial cable and a USB cable can transfer data in either direction, however a parrallel cable cannot it can only go from the computer to the device attached.
Therefore if your SP-300 is conneceted via the parallel cable, it will not be able see and send the info back to the computer.

Does anyone runn a versacamm from corel draw?
Whats the process for reloading material to contur cut after it’s been removed for laminating.

Out of curiosity Iosif, what are you printing on a laser than can’t be printed on the versacamm?

[Rodney Gold]

The 300 will only read printer generated marks (from the rip).
You can do a manual align too (afaik) and at the moment Im experimenting with double sided contour cut decals that can be pasted inside a window.
How Im doing this is to revers print on clear with the factory crop marks , overlaminate white , read the crop marks and then print on the white using those as base points and then re read the cropmarks and die cut thru both white and clear.
Im having problems with print registration and the crop marks (Printer generated or other) and have fiddled with manual alignments and am finding out exactly how the machine reads these and how much the cut is offset to x and y if it doesnt have printer generated marks.
In the manual (at least the soljet one) there is a section describing EXACTLY how the machine prints the cropmarks in relation to the graphic , and one could most likely replicated those marks and manually place them in a printed graphic from another machine and then get the sp300 to read them for a cut.
The other problem is that in the print / reload /cut workflow , one actually has to print the file to get the cut queue appearing.
I will solve this “problem” one way or another and will report back.
I was also wondering why a laser and why you cant do it on the versacam? I would also hate to mess with a4 sheets in this manner.
I run a soljet which reads the marks automatically , I will DL the 300 manual and have a look what it says there about how it reads.

[Chris Wool]

rodney
i have been following this thread but could not put in writing whot i was trying to surjest
you are well on the case in most of these things
if i am doing reversed out on to clear then back with white i cut the white away where the dots are for the machine to read them this has worked very well
having the sol find the marks the 00 point has moved to the right angle of the first dot
i have not tried to replicate these dots & bar in to a print manually but cant see why not extreame care with there alignment though after the sol has found the markers just a cut only file should do it

chris

[Chris Wool]

rodney
just re read your note
it was not until i used rip 2B & firmware 4.5 did the machine reregister correctly

chris

[Rodney Gold]

There is a firmware upgrade to 4.60 at Rolands site under support – dunno what all these firmware updates do , Roland America doesn’t like me much (Iv’e had a few posts banned on their site cos of some awkward questions I asked 🙂 and despite me asking em , wont give a “revision history” , evidently they make cutting etc a bit better as well as introducing new service menu’s (my dealer curses me if I have put in a firmware upgrade and then he comes out to do something on the machine , he recently came out to retrofit new brackets to the pumps , something to do with tubing fouling the pump without it and my machine was making groaning noises)
In terms of rip generated cropmarks and printing using the machine to autoalign to them , it seems the print is shifted 20mm to the left on the X axis but is in position in the Y axis.