Horizontal Lines / Veritcal bars on prints using Ricoh Printer SG7100DN

[Justin]

I don't think that's going to help with a Ricoh tbh. You have a warranty so be careful how much you do before speaking to SG etc. They will probably get you to align heads.

[Lebowski]

Hi Justin,


Thanks for the message. I have just gone through both the Adjust Print-head Positions and Adjust Paper Feed tests again. For the Print-head Positions i kept everything at 0 as these seem like the straightest. For the Paper Feedi also kept it at 0 as this again seemed the straightest.

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I spoke to xpres earlier today and they were very helpful. They run me through some of the obvious checks and advised cleaning the encoder strip and although this has improved the quality slightly it hasn't stopped the banding which seems to be most obvious in the blues/greens or lighter colours. Black is perfect, no banding or lines at all. 1 week ago everything was working perfect and has been for the last year and a half. I spoke to Sawgrass earlier an explained everything to them but they couldn't really do anything. I was asked to email all of the information and photos, including everything i've tried to resolve the issue but haven't heard back from anyone yet. As always, these problems only seem to occur when i have a backlog of work.

[Lebowski]

Yeah for sure. The warranty for my Ricoh SG7100DN ran out on 08/03/15 sadly, never had any issues with it until now.

[UK Printed Mugs]

I realised there was one more step to try which also made our banding better. if you have "unidirectional" checked when printing then uncheck which makes print head bi-directional.

[Lebowski]

Thanks, yeah i tried that earlier actually, unfortunately it didn't make a difference to the print and still shows the same horrible banding on those lighter colours. I've also tried changing the paper input to inkjet paper and gloss paper but neither made it any better. No matter what print quality combinations are selected, the print doesn't seem to improve. The only thing that has made a noticeable difference was the print head alignment and cleaning the encoder strip but now that both have been done i'm at all loss as to what to do next.

[wayupnorth]

Reading this thread I see that you have not tried deleting the printer & drivers and re-installing. Also worth trying Powerdriver. Long shot but I have seen many weird issues that are driver based.

[Lebowski]

Hi Wayupnorth, good idea, i haven't tried that yet. I'll give that a go now and post my results.

[Lebowski]

So i uninstalled both the printer and power-driver this morning and gave everything a fresh install and setup, including the photoshop colour profile settings. Sadly, this didn't make any difference to the print and the banding is still visible in the lighter colours (mostly the blues).





I was however reading through the Sawgrass technical support and they advised doing a few full page colour tests on regular paper instead of sublimation paper and to my amazement, the regular page prints out cyan perfectly. There's no visible banding at all.



As soon as put the sublimation paper back in (TruPix Classic Sublimation papaer from Xpres A3) the banding starts again.




If i do the full page colour test on the sublimation paper i get banding. What a nightmare.





I have also tried full colour page prints of the Yellow, Red and Black. The Red and Yellow are absolutely perfect, not a single line out of place or banding of any kind, just solid colour.






When it comes to the black, printing a full colour test page from the printer itself instead of from photoshop renders the blacks brown but printing as i would do normally from Photoshop + colour profile settings produces black, i'm not bothered about this as it's only a for the test. I can see a little banding in the 'printers black full page colour test' but very little if i print black from photoshop.

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[Lebowski]

I thought i'd install the printer and power driver on another machine just in case it was my own PC that was causing the problem but nope, didn't change a thing. Anyone ever experienced anything like this before? Its now started banding on lighter colours like red and orange also

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[Justin]

I think this is the printer, speak to Sawgrass and tell them it's under warranty and you want it sorting. These previous models have had banding issues resulting in replacement being required.