I recently finished a job where a client wanted a set of matted fine-art prints with their logo on the final product. I am loathe to cover fine photography with graphics, so I came up with the idea of printing on the mat.
I was working with the Redi-Pak product from redimat.com.
I’ve got a Canon Pixma Pro 9000 II that has a flat-feed for printing on sheets up to 1.2mm thick. The mats are spec’d for .04 to .06 inches (1.0 to 1.5mm) thick, which seemed like it would probably work.
The first thing was to figure out how to operate the flat feed mechanism. Thanks to a helpful post over at imaging-resource.com, I got that figured out. The tricky bit is closing the front paper tray most of the way, lifting it up, and then deploying it back down from the higher pivot point. This sets the tray up so that it is level with the rollers, and you feed your work in backwards from normal print direction.
The second problem was that the printer absolutely positively refuses to print on anything with a hole in it. It has some kind of detection mechanism (probably part of the paper feed/misfeed sensing system) that throws an error if you just naively feed through a mat with a window. Taping a sheet of paper over the hole didn’t fix the problem, so I think it must be a pressure sensor in the feed rollers rather than an optical sensor. I ended up cutting a custom-sized piece of matting that fit into the hole, and held it in with tape.
The final problem involved smudging. For whatever reason, the printheads would sometimes brush against the unprinted area and smudge the clean mat. Setting the printer driver for printing on thick media helped, and I solved the problem (for the most part) by putting a sheet of paper over the area that tended to smudge.
The technique is relatively labor intensive (each mat has to be fed individually, bringing back memories of burning hundreds of CDs on a slow burner), so it is probably unsuited to mass-production. In bulk, printing on a small area, each print took around 4 minutes. Overall, I was pretty happy with the results. Printing on the mat allows a customization of the final product that doesn’t obscure the actual image. This technique could be used to print on the backing board as well, with details like photographer, contact info, date, location, etc. Doing that would be much nicer than the more typical sticker.
I’ll try and remember to post pictures later.
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