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What are they?

These black dots are pin wheel roller marks or are commonly known as pizza cutter marks in the edible printing industry.

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Why do they occur?

The final set of rollers that your icing sheets pass through in the printer are known as ‘pinwheel’ rollers. They are small and gear shaped with spikey points – just like a pizza cutter.

Icing sheets are soft and relatively thick (compared to normal paper), the soft ‘icing’ coating keeps the ink close to the surface and prevents it from drying quickly.

This is perfect for the quality of your edible prints, but not so great when you are printing in humid conditions or printing images with a large concentration of ink in one spot. 

The pin wheel rollers will just roll right through the ink and track it over the entire icing sheet.

How do you fix them?

Step 1 – clean the rollers. Use the cleaning function in your printer maintenance menu or manually feed some dampened cardboard in and out of the rollers to absorb the ink reside.

Step 2 – check your print settings. Edible Image Supplies recommended Media Type – Plain Paper or High Quality. Using a Photo setting will put even more ink on the paper and can make the problem even worse so this should be avoided.

Step 3 – prevent print head abrasion. This setting can be found in the Printer Maintenance menu, Custom Settings. Click on the box to get the tick and turn it on. This will widen the clearance between the pin wheel roller and the icing sheet. 

*Note, there is a setting in Custom Settings relating to ink drying time, unfortunately this won’t help as it just changes the time between each print/paper feed if you are printing continuously.

Tip: We always recommend feeding your icing sheets from the back/rear feeder, not the bottom document tray