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... I recently saw a decal printed on OKI 711WT and I was not impressed (when comparing to Alps MD printed decals). Color registration was a big part of the issue, and so was the toner density. But it could be the printing technique/settings (the color density). And of course none of those OKI printers can't print metallic or metal foil inks.
It could easily be how the image was presented to the printer, and the printer's raster engine. On mine, if I compose the art and print it directly from InDesign, printer will default to 600x1200, and I have no say in the matter. Looks like crap. Export to PDF and print from Acrobat improves (1200x1200), but still not good enough. So I then import the PDF to Photoshop, force it to raster to a 2400x2400 image (yes, huge), and print from Photoshop. That works. That's a way of saying that I suspect the Oki engine might be able to be manipulated that way, but OTOH the white layer has to be expressed as a separate vector layer to be rasterized in the printer's engine... so... I don't know. I'd have to spend time with it.What I have read is the "cheaper" Oki printers are 600x1200, and that won't do. The Oki C941 (CMYKW, $20K) is 1200x1200.In more testing this morning, my home-brew decals don't pass muster for dark surfaces. Gotta have that white behind the color.
... Why would it require vector-format white while it can handle raster format for CYM colors? That seems odd.
It is the way I would expect it to work, but that said I don't know the specific rasterization engine they're using. There would have to be something very special about it, such as a masking mode that would mess with the normal print order, print black as white first and know that it has to print under any other color at 100%. My head is spinning thinking through the "exception" algorithms that would make this happen versus the normal YMCK deposition sequence, especially doing this against the mechanical toner order.IOW, I want to know how Oki puts white in the black position - normally last - and makes it print first. In the thinking about it, that might be the registration problem you were seeing - two passes. Push the paper through twice to print the black station first (with white toner in it), then follow with a color pass. The mind boggles.Vector versus raster is tricky when you get into spot colors, and white is going to be a non-process spot color. Of course you can put down a rasterized mask (or whatever), but is your image source data going to understand that? How is it going to be communicated to the printer? Is a white layer possible in, say, JPEG? Trap, or not, and if so, how much? It's been nearly two decades since I've been hands-on programming rasterization engines, but these are the kind of details that used to keep me up at night in managing pre-press operations.
You are too familiar with the printing processes and you are applying too much logic into this. ...
I believe that OKI C941 has 5 toner transfer units and it will correctly apply white toner under CYM inks.
Yep, that's what I see, too, and that's what it's going to take, five colors, no waiting. And I only need 20 of my bestest Railwire friends to contribute $1000 each so I can buy one.
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Topic: DIY Laser Decals - Comparing Decal Papers (Read 7275 times)
