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Monday, June 26, 2017

L801 Full-Bleed Label Printing

While attending the recent Afinia reseller meeting, I learned about a relatively new feature built into the L801 printer driver, which makes full-bleed printing relatively easy.  Let me tell you more.


L801 Full-Bleed Printed Label
L801 Full-Bleed Printed Label
If this company is new to you, Afinia Label (www.afinialabel.com) was founded in 2009 to offer specialty printing solutions with best-in-class support at accessible prices. Their parent company, Microboards Technology, has been offering media duplication products since 1989. This background gives Afinia a rock-solid foundation of technical expertise, and decades of experience providing the best possible customer service.  

In the past, I’ve written about one of their new products, the L301:  

and we’ve sold some of their other products.  Afinia’s major product is the L801 which uses the Memjet print engine:

The L801 prints beautiful labels up to 8.5” wide; especially using the dye-based inks.  Although the dye inks are not sufficiently durable for many applications, they produce a very vibrant color, which is required for many prime label applications where many customers want to print full-bleed.

But full-bleed printing can be difficult on die-cut labels.  You must get some ink on the exposed liner; but not too much.  Too much ink on the liner may transfer to the label itself.  I written about full-bleed label printing in the past.  Here is a recent post covering full-bleed printing.


Now in the driver, Afinia has added to their driver controls that make it easy to print full-bleed labels.  To cover labels 100% with ink, you need to first know the orientation of the labels. To know the “language” that Afinia uses to describe the label orientation.

L801 Label Orientation
L801 Label Orientation
The leading edge of the label (the edge that comes out of the printer first) is described as the “Top”; making the trailing edge of the label the “Bottom”.  Standing behind the printer, you’ll find the “Left” and the “Right” edges.  When facing the printer, the left and right are reversed (naturally).

When printing full-bleed, Afinia recommends making the size of the label in the driver slightly larger than the actual label size.  I’ve used 0.03” as my standard recommendation since I’ve written this article on the LX2000:


Once the print size is set in the driver, Afinia recommends printing a few labels to examine the initial print output.  You need to ignore the first label, according to Afinia, to enable the settings to be completely implemented.

Once printing, you can see if the image need to move up or down; or right to left to better fit.  To move the image in the template, it’s simple to do using the position adjustment.

L801 Position Adjustment
L801 Position Adjustment
The position adjustment provides the movement direction for positive or negative inches or millimeters you can adjust the image. This diagram makes it very simple to center the image correctly on the label.  Again the idea is to have only a very thin line of ink on the liner; covering the edge of the label completely.  Here is the setting we used during our training:

L801 Position Adjustment
L801 Position Adjustment
Once this setting is establish, Afinia recommends printing a few more labels.

If you still have an edge or two that is still slightly off, you can make an “offset” adjustment on a single edge.  This setting basically stretches the edge slightly; just enough to eliminate a thin ribbon of white label showing; or to reduce the overprint slightly.  Again, here is my setting during training:

L801 Offset Adjustment
L801 Offset Adjustment
It’s a genus idea that makes printing full-bleed easier to do.


According to Mike Atkins, National Sales Manager for Afinia, “The low cost of ink and great quality of color output from the L801 has made it one of our most popular options for prime label applications. However, printing edge-to-edge has certainly presented a challenge to users in the past. These latest updates in the driver have opened up what our customers can do with the L801, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.”

If you need to print full-bleed labels; but don’t want to spend a lot of time adjusting the print, contact us to help you with the L801 color label printer from Afinia.


Guy Mikel
855-962-7670

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