higher print speeds question..

[DaveC]

Hi all,

Im primarily printing canvas art but every now and then i get some colours that band no matter what I do (using roland inks). The majority of printing takes place at normal settings. I never get banding at high quality printing but of course this take eons to complete a 24x36" canvas!

Upto about a week ago Ive never delved into the "head speed" setting as it seems to be default at 720 and I guess this was fast enough.

Then, through boredom and tedious waiting, I decided to up the ante on high quality and set the head speed to a whopping 900 . Im now getting prints a tad slower than normal setting and I cant see any issues with quality vs normal settings.

My question is this; Am i helping the heads to an early grave by speeding things up? Does anyone else crank up their print speeds?

Cheers all
Dave.

[Jmass]

Looking forward to reading the advice on this one.
Also do alot of high qaulity and would love to get them out quicker.

[slangsc]

head speed has more to do with material compatibility than life of the head. I suppose that running it at a faster speed means it has to fire more rapidly and could heat up faster, but under the proper environmental conditions it should be no big deal. If your media can't take the ink load, slowing the head speed down to get the ink to dry a little more in between head passes is one way to try to reduce banding and pooling. One drawback of increasing the head speed is that you could increase your dot gain and your media profiles could end up being off slightly. Custom profiling takes care of that issue.

[ziggytim]

i do 360x720 for most prints. for complex ones, 720x720. for realllyyy simple stuff 720x720 4 pass.

[MasterSolventTech]

you cannot "overdrive" the printheads by speeding up your printing. There are printhead rest and temp setting in the firmware to prevent this. 360 will print faster and use less ink, but the prints will be faded in comparison to 720 which will be 100% saturation and will print 2x slower.