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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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:
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| 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:
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| 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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