Common Digital Print Problems and How We Avoid Them

The print problems we work hard to avoid

It's true, the easiest part of digital printing is buying the machine, assuming the bank likes you. Yes, the printers are automated, but they still need a lot of user interaction to make the difference between a good print and a not so good one. Look closely at the not so good prints, and it usually comes down to a few important details that require real skill, not just sending a file to a machine. Here's a small snapshot of some of the problems we work hard to avoid.

Keeping the machine in good order

Maintenance and care matter a lot here. We keep our machines in very good order to avoid issues like these:

• Banding. A venetian blind style effect, usually caused by blocked print nozzles. On a bad day it can look more like a zebra crossing. This shouldn't be confused with the faint bands that are sometimes naturally visible due to the digital print process itself.
• Feed issues. The machine steps the media the wrong distance, leaving bold stripes, dark or light, that were never in your file.
• Ink drops. Unwanted spots of ink dropping from the nozzles during printing, usually caused by slack cleaning routines.
• Mis-registered prints. The cyan, magenta, yellow and black layers are supposed to line up precisely, when they don't, the print suffers.

It's not just about the machine

There's a whole set of issues we avoid through skilled operators and years of experience with file handling, especially with how far design software has come in just the last five years. Some of the issues we work to bypass include:

• We can't read your file. You're very unlikely to ever hear that from us.
• Wrong colour. We manage your file from the design program through to the RIP, making sure your colours are handled correctly and reproduced accurately.
• Bad excuses. You'll never hear "well, that's what your file was" from us. If something's not right, we'll call you before it goes to print incorrectly.
• Transparency issues. The tricky side of PDFs. These show up as colour changes, missing elements, or the classic shade lighter block around an element with a soft drop shadow placed on a coloured background. We go after these problems hard, though occasionally they still win.
• Uneven calibration (ink output). A number of environmental factors affect how much ink a printer jets out. We measure this regularly and rebalance the system to account for any change, which is a big part of why our colour consistency holds up.
• Uneven calibration (software vs printer). Sometimes everything looks great on screen, but the print doesn't match, because what the printer is actually doing and what the software thinks it's doing have drifted apart. Running our calibrations, called linearisations, brings the two back in sync so they work as a team.

Why this matters

Our daily aim is that you never come face to face with any of these problems. Every job we produce, however simple it looks, is the result of the collective skill of a number of operators working behind the scenes. It's tempting to go with the cheapest option down the road, but taking everything into account, nine times out of ten it comes down to getting what you pay for. It's as much about the process as it is about the final print.

FAQs

What causes banding in digital prints?
Banding is usually caused by blocked print nozzles, producing a venetian blind or striped effect across the print. It's different from the faint natural bands that can sometimes appear as part of the digital print process itself.

Why do print colours sometimes look different from what was designed on screen?
This can happen when a printer's actual output has drifted from what the printing software expects. Regular calibration, known as linearisation, realigns the two so the printed colour matches what was intended.

Why does skilled print operation matter if the printers are automated?
Automated printers still require careful file handling, colour management, and machine maintenance to avoid issues like mis-registration, ink drops, and transparency problems in PDFs. Skilled operators catch and correct these before they affect the final print.

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