Printing on Textured Stock

I’ve been active in WhatTheyThink’s PrintPlanet forums for a couple years, and see a lot of conversations around difficulty printing on textured stock. Some customers are seeing mottling and experiencing other poor image quality issues, and I’ve noticed they aren’t using the Custom Profile Adjustments feature available on their digital press.  These profiles are on the Xerox 700, DocuColor 5000AP and DocuColor 7002/8002; and can greatly impact (improve) toner transfer for those difficult types of substrates.
So how do they work?
The custom profile adjustments give the user the ability to change, up or down, the electrical charge that is present in the Bias Transfer Roll. This helps tune in the proper current necessary for electrical current to penetrate the paper and pull the toner from the IBT belt to the top side of the paper effectively. These settings can vary depending on temperature and humidity of the room, the thickness and coating of the paper, texture, and the area coverage. Also, when any of the variables I listed above changes, so may the image quality/transfer. In winter you might need a profile and in the summer you may not, providing the room is not climate controlled, etc.
The best science for this is to play with the numbers in both directions while running the paper and tuning the numbers at the same time, and look for worse or better images (When you are creating the profiles, you can run a “test image” so you can stay in that window and make adjustments).

Several customers have had great success using these profiles, so if you are struggling as well, give the profiles a shot and let me know if it helped!
– Lindsay Lamb