UV Flatbed printing

[Ryan]

We have a UV machine capable of printing 8 x 4′ panels or smaller, up to 740 dpi using Spectra heads. The machine has worked reasonably well for us but we do not actively sell digital print using it as its mainly a production workhorse for our own projects.

We have had a few issues, some of which we are still waiting to get resolved. Keying to substrates can be a problem and you normally have to wait a good 24 hours before its okay to scratch test. You need to carefully test and select the best substrates from different suppliers and even then you can come unstuck if they change their manufacturing process or material has been in stock for a while (something to do with the din value).

Banding and glazing on block colours. Busy images fine, this is down to the way the ink is layed but we are assured by the manufacturer that this will be resolved in our next upgrade, we’ll see..

Static, arghhhh! Still working on this one, we pre apply anti-static cleaner which helps.

Software, the RIP software that came with our machine is pretty poor but its a leading brand I believe. Proof is in the pudding I suppose but we have tried ripping a similar file on an alternative package and it took 90% less time!

Aftersales support, ours has been poor. Be interesting to hear how you are getting on with yours and whether you have similar problems.

[Andrea M.]

We have issues with banding in solids. This seems to decrease when we print slower, but we are a production minded shop. Although our machine is equipped with static eliminators on either side of the print head, we have started experiencing problems with static pulling ink into the white areas of the print this week. We chalk that one up to the dry winter weather. We print alot of POP signage to styrene, and this is where we have adhesion problems. High cure melts the styrene if we print full bleed, so we print on oversized stock when possible. Our other issue with styrene is head strikes because the material curls slightly on the edges. And of course they occur when you are doing the second side. We raise the head to avoid this but this in turn causes fuzzier prints.
Support is great. If our dealer doesn’t know how to solve our problems, he tries to find answers for us. We rely on them mostly for mechanical problems. We have had several upgrades since we bought the machine just a little over a year ago.
We haven’t had much time to test theories, too much work to do. I will post as I learn things.
Andrea