How to Eliminate Lead Screw Drive Banding Problems

Universal Thread Application Notes

Universal's lead screw assemblies, with lead accuracies to 10 microinches per turn and 25 microinches per inch, eliminate the "once around" banding problems common in high-performance color scanners, printers, and recorders.

Graphic arts equipment designers define "banding" as the stripes which can occur on an image, perpendicular to the travel of the lead screw drive, with a spacing equal to the lead of the lead screw. These stripes, simulated in Figure 1, are caused by nonlinearity of the lead screw thread helix. On an actual output image, the result of banding is a sinusoidal variation in output pixel density, which degrades the image, as the lead screw rotates through each turn. Figure 2 shows the elimination of banding, specifically, a constant output pixel density.

Universal Thread offers standard and custom lead screw assemblies to eliminate banding of the digitized image density. Contact us today to discuss your application.