One of the most difficult artifacts to reduce is horizontal banding. Print head, media, ink, and the printer driver are just a few examples of potential areas that may cause this artifact.
There are several things you can do to minimize horizontal banding. They include:
1. Learn proper maintenance and adjustment techniques that will ensure the condition of
your print head in order to reduce nozzle drop out.
2. Make sure you choose quality media and ink combinations.
3. Make sure you are using proper settings within your printer and driver.
After your printer is working well, you need to ensure that your media and inks produce an acceptable output. The steps involved vary from one printer manufacture to the next. However, to set up your printer to use media properly, you must determine how accurate your media feeds through your printer. After this is complete, you must determine the proper print head height and heaters settings to match your media. After you identify your entire media characteristics, you can begin the process of getting the right amount of ink onto your media.
The 4 stages listed below will help you determine how the ink attaches to the media. This will help you to avoid horizontal banding, by not over/under saturating your media.
4 stages to control ink placement:
1. Individual Ink Densities (Ink Restrictions)
2. Balancing the gradation of the densities (Linearization)
3. Media’s capability to hold ink: Ink Load ( Ink limits/multi-ink limits)
4. Fingerprinting/Characterizing a printer or the ability of a printer to reproduce know
color values (Profiling)
