Universal Laser Systems X2-600 Specifications download pdf (Page 28)

GRAPHICS SOFTWARE SETUP

Section 3-6

Choose Your Material

The best material to use is one that has the highest contrast such as black anodized aluminum,

black marble, or black cored engravers plastic with a white micro surfaced coating. While other

materials may work ok, they might not produce the highest quality.

Establishing Nominal Power

Choose your %Speed and you Image Density settings. Set the PPI to 1000 but don’t set the

%Power setting just yet. The objective is to use the LOWEST %Power setting that produces the

most contrast such as the whitest (as in black anodized aluminum) or the darkest (as in black

cored engravers plastic with a white micro surfaced coating) results. This is what we call the

“nominal” power setting. Over-powering the material will produce poor results.

In your graphics software, create a series of 5 rectangles that are about ¼ inch high and 6 inches

wide as in the following diagram:

Starting with the top rectangle set the power setting to a value that you know will be too low. For

example, engrave the first rectangle at 5% power, increasing the power for each subsequent

rectangle 5% finishing the series off at 25% power and note the results. Choose the rectangle

that uses the lowest %Power setting to achieve the most contrast. If 25% is not enough power,

then engrave the rectangles once again, this time starting at 25% and incrementing by 5% and so

on.

In this particular example, we’ll say that 20% power looks over-burned but 15% appears under-

burned. Since the material may be sensitive to small power changes, you may need to narrow it

down a bit further. Engrave a new series of rectangles, but this time start the top rectangle at

15% then add 1% for the next rectangle, and so forth, until you find the best setting between 15%

and 20%.

The setting that produces the highest contrast using the least amount of %Power is called the

nominal power setting.

Engraving a Calibration Scale

Now that you have established the nominal power setting, you will need to engrave a grayscale

calibration scale. You can create one of your own or use the one provided for you which can be

found on the printer driver disk called “Calibration Scale.CDR”. This is a CorelDRAW 8 file so

using versions 8 and higher will open the file. The scale looks like this:

00 01 02

04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15

Each rectangle is .5 inches wide and .25 inches tall. Each successive shade of gray is

incremented by 16 levels starting at 0 and ending at 255. The numbers below the scale are there

as a reference to the 16 levels of power control (explained later) and do not need to be engraved

if you do not want to.

You can also load a custom grayscale color palette into your CorelDRAW program. This file can

also be found on your driver disk and is named “ULS photo.cpl”. Use this palette if you want to

create your own calibration scale.

1 2 ... 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 ... 42 43

No comments

Universal Laser Systems X2-600 Specifications Page 28