Mdrake2016

So I've been looking at the mini shaker and trying to figure out how the take up reel works. Does it somehow sense the film moving and start rotating it it as the film moves? Or is it a speed adjustment knob that controls the rotation speed? I would think a knob controlling it would cause problems since every print speed is different.

Yea I refill my carts (I just leave them in the printer) at least 8 times a day. Colors probably 3-4. I'll get this all figured out eventually. I don't give up lol. I am going to get the powder shaker machine and hopefully that will help me dial things in.

Thanks for the detailed info. The choke thing is unfortunately a bit off on my end. It's about 1-2 pixels too low so if I have a choke less than 5, the white pokes out from the top of the print. This is the main reason I'm considering Acrorip. I also forgot to ask about this on my first post. Some of my cured prints end up looking like this image attached. It basically has tiny holes through the whole print and it does show on the final print. It seems pretty random on when this happens. Have you come across this issue?

I am using a Custsize.ini file but the thing is, it was working great, 0 issues. Then suddenly a print started printing 2 inches from the top. I restarted my computer and printer and now it suddenly worked. Very strange.

I'm glad I asked! I thought that was the recommended thing to do. Now I suddenly came across another problem I hope you can help ASAP. I'm currently using A3 sheets and suddenly, EK Print is starting the print 2 inches from the top of the sheet. I haven't changed any settings and the last 200 prints I did started exactly where I placed it at the top of the print (usually about .5 inches from the top). Any idea what could be happening there? This is causing my 14.5 inch prints to print too low at the bottom of the page, and causing the printhead to smear the last bit of the image.

I would say I’m a beginner (10 years of printing but to this day still struggle when it comes to clogs. I’ve thrown away printers after failing to clear clogs that somehow happens within 5 minutes of modifying a printer to use sublimation inks), but so far the XP-15000 seems to be easy to use. The only thing I worry about is trying to clear a clog since that has been my biggest issue all these years. I have 1 clogged nozzle that a printhead cleaning (through the menu) isn’t clearing up and I thought I could take the printhead out and use those little tubes to put into the nipples of the printhead, inject printhead cleaning solution in it until the nozzles are all clear, but I obviously can’t do that with this printer since it uses the foam cartridges.

Yes this is important and something I failed to do a few times. It’s basically like when there is liquid in a straw and your finger plugs the top. When you let go, the liquid falls out. This helped me realize how these cartridges work.

As I'm playing around with the XP-15000, I've been coming across a few things here and there that I'm noticing and that I'm unsure of how it's supposed to be. If anyone has played around with DTF long enough, I'd appreciate if you can help me out with these questions. 1. Banding - I noticed some people printing setting the color to print at 1440x720. At this setting on my printer, I see banding when I select this resolution. Does anyone else notice banding on their printer when using this resolution? 2. Opacity - I've seen all types of suggestions for the opacity of the white underbase. On my end, if using 1440x1440, 75% is the absolute lowest I can go. Going any lower results in the shirt color showing through. A white on a blue shirt for example would look like a baby blue color. When using 1440x720, I have to use 100%. Do you all find these to be the same in your settings? 3. Choke settings - I use EKPrint which has less settings than Acrorip. For example, you can adjust the choke on all 4 sides on Acrorip while you can't do the same with EKPrint. Am I wrong here or is there a way to make better adjustments? On my printer, 4 is the absolute lowest I can go because the choke is closer to the edge on 1 side. Wish I could get it shifted a bit more in without having to use a larger choke. 4. White vs White Underbase - EKPrint seems to consider ANY white on my print as a white underbase. So if I have an image that has a solid white anywhere, I have to make sure to have "white underbase" selected or it completely omits the white part. Is this the same with Acrorip? 5. Acrorip vs EKPrint - Any reason you picked one over the other? So far the only functionality I wish EKPrint had over Acrorip was the extra choke settings.

Did the printer literally unroll the whole roll? That must have been a pain to roll up again lol

I've done some crazy amount of testing since your last few posts and I realized why my 10x10 print (circular....so it should be even faster) was taking 8 minutes. I put the ink density to 60% in the white underbase settings but EKRip automatically changed it to 600%. I guess I have to choose the defaults on the drop down. However, after changing it to 75%, I'm now printing that design in 4:28 which I start timing immediately when the printhead starts laying down the first pass. At a full A3 page (11 x 15 to leave 2 inches of space at the bottom), I'm getting around 5.5 minutes for a rectangular design with a white underbase. I somehow overlooked the underbase settings you suggested here. Just to be clear here, you mean I need to move that "Opacity contrast" slider to the -35 (more white ink side)? 50% density alone when I tested last week absolutely did not look good at all. The color of the shirt basically showed through the print. Also, anyone that has this printer, can you tell me if this is what it looks like under your cartridges (pic attached)? It looks like ink from the other cartridges somehow flow over each other. It hasn't affected my prints at all but wondering if this is normal. I made sure there were no leaks when I put the cartridges in. Even cleaned them multiple times and they always end up like this.

Just to be clear on this, 18 an hour with just 1 of the shaker machines? Man even 18 an hour is great...I timed a 10x10 print I just did for a customer right now (with a white underbase) and it printed in almost exactly 8 min on the dot. What could be the reason for this? I do 1440x1440 for color and white. I think even if I change it to 1440x720, I got 5 min out of the same print when I tried a few days ago. 18 prints an hour comes out to 3.3 min per print.

Hey Johnson. Can you explain this when you get a chance? How big are your prints? Why would you get 2" a minute in manual mode (I'm assuming A3 sheets....I'm getting about 2" a minute as well) but in roll mode you get 35 prints in an hour? I'm trying to figure out how to speed this thing up a bit. Right now at 2" a minute, I'm averaging around 8 minutes per print. That's 7.5 prints per hour. It's almost twice as fast if I change the resolution to both the color and the white to 1440x720 but the banding shows when I drop the resolution.

Nevermind on that first question about the reds. Apparently, using Medium droplet size fixed it. I guess I didn't test the colors in Medium until now. Starting to lose track of what I've done. It looks like the density is too high as well at 100% so I will have to play with that. Now the grain is my only issue.

So I thought I had everything on point but I'm still having a bit of trouble on the colors and the graininess. I'm literally printing boxes for testing and the grain still happens at different shades. These are printed at 300 DPI. Please take a look at the attachment. Besides that, I'm still having other trouble when it comes to colors: 1. I cannot get a solid red no matter what. That picture on my last post looks red but in person, it's more orange when I print it out. I mean I literally can't even get any shade of red....only orange. I'm pretty sure this has to do with my settings. Can you tell me your full settings on your set up? These are my settings for both the color and white underbase: Ink Drop Size - Light Ink Level - 2 Color Mode - Vivid Density - 100% for both If I change the Ink Drop Size to Medium, I would select Ink Level 1 to get a similar print to the settings I have above. Medium at Level 2 is way too much ink. 2. I've seen someone else use an L1800 profile for their XP15000 (with Acrorip) and their prints looked great. I downloaded the L1800 profile from DTF Superstore to give that a try. However, I'm a little confused on what to select for "Input RGB ICC Profile." If I just select the "Adobe RGB (1998)" from my color profiles that I found on my computer, the reds actually print in teal lol. I'm used to just selecting a color profile in Photoshop when printing, never had to put in an input profile.

Weird but good thing on my end...I've noticed that the print ink levels on my XP1500 are staying full after making it chipless. I've printed about 10 full A3 size papers so far for testing and they haven't budged.

It looks like changing the color mode to Vivid fixed it. Attached is a basic test chart I printed just now. The chart on top shows the grays looking very purplish when in Graphic mode. The one below it shows a perfect gray (ignore the smear lol...not used to working with wet ink). The particular CMYK numbers were C-25%, M-20%, Y-20% for the light gray and C-52%, M-43%, Y-43%, K-7%. Now the only other thing I'd like to fix is the graininess. Changing the droplet size to light made the whole thing too light, so I adjusted the ink level to 3 and it was darker but the grain came back. Is there some other setting I'm missing here?

Let me clarify about the driver. I had originally installed the Epson drivers for the printer, and within EK Rip I selected "Epson XP-15000 Series." Now I know that I need to install the EK Rip driver and select "EKPrint RIP for XP15000." I'm hoping this resolves my problem.

I did the same as you and put the white on Red and Gray and put the others in their original slots. Nozzle check is attached. Sorry for the quality...light went out in the room. I went through the EK Print manual and it looks like I did miss 1 step though...installing the EK driver for the XP-15000. I apparently had the demo downloaded and thought I just had to install that alone. I will have to see if this fixes the issue tomorrow.

Could it be because my "Channel Setup" is stuck on YMCK-WWWW? The EK Print manual says to select "YMCK-WWXX when only having 2 White channels (which is what the XP-15000 has), but selecting this is greyed out on my EK Print.

I'm pretty stumped then if it should be working without a color profile. I used Andy's inks, film, and powder and my colors are coming out completely off. I had an image that had a gradient that went from black to white (with other colors so I can't print it in Grayscale mode). The gradient ended up printing purple to white. I have the Epson color settings to "No color adjustment" and within EK Print, I have "Graphics" Color Mode selected. I don't see what I could be doing wrong here. Take a look at this picture straight out of the printer. The label on the black powder bag is for comparison so you could see the black on that label versus what I printed out.

Sorry to keep bugging you man...I'm almost there. I got everything working..had 1 hiccup (left both plugs in when installing cartridges so it was printing blank). I got it printing now but after a few test prints, I realized my colors are way off. Do you have any color profile for the XP-15000?

This may be a stupid question but would I have to clean the nipples on the printhead before loading up the cleaning carts? I'm not sure if it matters if the cleaning carts get contaminated by the inks at all.

Would you say it's unnecessary (or would it cause any problems) if I were to run a few headcleans of the printhead solution a couple times a week for maintenance?

Thanks man. I'm actually preparing to place my order now and see 4 different cleaners on DTF Superstore (Capping station cleaner, print flush fluid, printhead cleaning solution, and clog buster). I emailed them about what is necessary for DTF printing but haven't heard back yet. Do you have an opinion on which ones are needed? For some reason, I thought 1 liquid was all that's needed to handle any of the issues that can arise.

Please keep us updated. Issues like this have been my nightmare for the past 10 years, which is why I switched over to White Toner Printing, but the headache and cost of that is even worse. Trying everything I can do make sure I avoid problems when I get the DTF set up.