Poor quality of backprinting

AFBlue

I ordered two of my own prints through SM to check the quality of prints my customers were getting. I was happy with everything except the backprinting. The backprinting was done in a very small font and looked like it was done by a 9-pin dot-matrix printer. Between the small font, and 9-pin look (no descenders, for example) the backprinting was essentially unreadable, which takes away any banding value it might have had.
Any hope that EZ Prints might improve the quality of the printing so it can be useful (read)?

Andy

AFBlue wrote:

Any hope that EZ Prints might improve the quality of the printing so it can be useful (read)?

Yes, we're taking some measures this week to do that. But it is still gonna be dot matrix print, not much can be done about that, I'm afraid

AFBlue

Andy wrote:

Yes, we're taking some measures this week to do that. But it is still gonna be dot matrix print, not much can be done about that, I'm afraid

I understand that dot matrix print is the norm. But if the font used for the backprinting were at least as large as the administrative info they put on the photo, it could be read. I hope that is what you're shooting for.

davidweaver

The Fuji Frontier printers use a dot matrix print head and a continuous loop ribbon cartridge. The original intent of backprinting was to provide the lab with means to identify a print for packaging, and trouble issues like reprints. Then came along a hack for adding more info to the backprint. The backprinting problem is quality control issue in the lab. As long as a lab tech can read it then it is fine. It may not be fine for you or me or an end user. So I'll bet Andy is asking them to replace the ribbons more often. :-) Nothing can probably be done about the font. I've confronted that issue working for a large lab a couple years back. Back then, the font set was some weird Fuji thing which is why you can't use many special characters in backprinting.


I don't think Cyra printers allow for customized backprinting in addition to the lab needs, or at least they didn't a couple years ago. BTW: Cyras are massive and extremely fast printers, shutterfly and others have a few of those Swiss gems around.

AFBlue wrote:

I understand that dot matrix print is the norm. But if the font used for the backprinting were at least as large as the administrative info they put on the photo, it could be read. I hope that is what you're shooting for.

AnneMcBean

davidweaver wrote:

So I'll bet Andy is asking them to replace the ribbons more often. :-)

davidweaver wrote:

Nothing can probably be done about the font. I've confronted that issue working for a large lab a couple years back. Back then, the font set was some weird Fuji thing which is why you can't use many special characters in backprinting.

We're going to change things up soon (about a month from now), to be more consistent across printers in the lab. Backprinting will move to all caps, to eliminate the sometimes funky lowercase characters that we were seeing on the high speed lines.

Another move towards consistency: We'll only be supporting English letters, numbers, paranthesis, dashes, and underscores a month from now. That is because some printers handle other characters on the keyboard well, others do not, and we want predictable results for our customers.

I'll update this thread, and our backprinting help page when the change occurs.

-Anne
Support Hero

AFBlue

AnneMcBean wrote:

We're going to change things up soon (about a month from now), to be more consistent across printers in the lab. Backprinting will move to all caps, to eliminate the sometimes funky lowercase characters that we were seeing on the high speed lines.

. . . .

Having the backprinting all caps should take care of the problem I had.