gradients are not smooth, free of streaks/bands

[Gallucci Art]

Illustrator will not create a clean enough gradient, as in a sky, or background, large area, without printing with horizontal lines. It cannot produce perfectly smooth gradients???

what's up with that?

It's not the printer, I was told to use photoshop, but that doesn't allow for the control illustrator has with color and adjustments.

[keengle9]

I just had this issue with a black to clear gradient over an image. I changed the black to be a mix of colors (CMYK) that's close enough to black without being 100% K, then I rasterized just the gradient and it fixed the banding issue.