OCE Arizona - Printing Greys

[Jake Howard]

Hi Guys,

Like most digital printers, we are having a lot of problems printing greys. They come out looking green.

Has anyone got any tips, tricks or advice for hitting good greys.

Cheers

Jake

 

[AlsEU]

You may need to play a little bit with ICC profiles. It's possible to print grey grey with Arizona, but profiles must be created properly and care taken on greys DURING the creation of the profile. Otherwise it may be easier/faster to make new one.

 

[Correct Color]

Profiles are indeed the reason anyone on any printer can't hit grey.

It's as simple as that.

Any workarounds or file altering are simply an attempt to alter a file to compensate for a profile that is describing a printer printing in some other condition than the one to which you're printing.

And, yes, you can buy a spectrophotometer and some software and devote an inordinate amount of time that you might instead devote to selling, or running your business, or any one of the countless other things that already demand your time, to learning how to rudimentally make profiles; and you can wade through the tons and tons of bad information online and finally make some profiles that you really don't know are any good or not. And unfortunately a bad profile is still a valid profile and will still drive your machine.

Or you can get Color By Correct Color, and actually look forward to printing greys because you know you'll hit them. First time Every time. Guaranteed.

 

[Brian27]

What kind of greys are you talking?

If it's the latter (and I suppose it's just a workaround) you can go in color replacement and change your output values to K only which I've found prints nice (actual) greys since you're taking out the C,M,Y content that usually throws off printed greys.

Have you found that Oce K is ACTUALLY black for the most part? Our Roland K is sometimes green and sometimes brown. It's infuriating.

The samples we got back from Oce have a green tint to it like our Roland does when we only print with K. I'm not sure if they printed out black tests with just K or with a composite black.

We had a black and white image to print for a bar a couple months ago and it kept coming out green. I spent about 3 hours messing with the profiles to print a very close grayscale. Two black cartridges later I tried it again with the exact same settings and it came out looking dirt brown.

 

[Correct Color]

Have you found that Oce K is ACTUALLY black for the most part? Our Roland K is sometimes green and sometimes brown. It's infuriating.

The samples we got back from Oce have a green tint to it like our Roland does when we only print with K. I'm not sure if they printed out black tests with just K or with a composite black.

We had a black and white image to print for a bar a couple months ago and it kept coming out green. I spent about 3 hours messing with the profiles to print a very close grayscale. Two black cartridges later I tried it again with the exact same settings and it came out looking dirt brown.

Just a couple things in reply:

First and foremost is that in printing grey, particularly on a machine with no light blacks, black is very seldom the issue. What is the issue is that most grey builds are predominantly some basically equal mix of CM&Y. For that reason, if how the printer prints is different from the profile generating the dots by even a small fraction, you will always see it in grey first.

Second is that if you're using Roland OEM ink, I'd think your problem might just be elsewhere.

Either that or you've had a run of really bad luck. That ink is the same ink that Epson and Mutoh use in their Eco-Sols as well. And over the years I've no doubt made literally thousands of profiles of machines using that blak ink.

One of my profile checks is to evaluate the actual CMYK primary L*a*b* values in every profile, and I've never seen that ink to be anything but the same color.

 

[Brian27]

Either that or you've had a run of really bad luck. That ink is the same ink that Epson and Mutoh use in their Eco-Sols as well. And over the years I've no doubt made literally thousands of profiles of machines using that blak ink.

Roland UV ink is the same ink Epson uses in their solvent printers?

When we we're still talking about replacement of the flatbed with Roland they sent us a sample of one of our files which used Roland color BK-21A which is just K. I printed the exact same thing on ours with the same settings. In the attached picture, the left and top are theirs and the right is mine. Ignoring the horrendous defects in my print, it's pretty clear theirs are green and mine is brown. The difference is much worse in person.

 

[Correct Color]

Bryan,

Roland UV ink is the same ink Epson uses in their solvent printers?

Sorry, my bad. I just saw Roland and assumed solvent. But of course you're right.

When we we're still talking about replacement of the flatbed with Roland they sent us a sample of one of our files which used Roland color BK-21A which is just K. I printed the exact same thing on ours with the same settings. In the attached picture, the left and top are theirs and the right is mine. Ignoring the horrendous defects in my print, it's pretty clear theirs are green and mine is brown. The difference is much worse in person.

I'll admit that I've always considered the Roland colors that come with Versaworks to be such a cheesy, terrible workaround that I've never advised a client to use them and have never worked with them myself at all. In fact several years ago I wrote a Pantone C Versaworks spot color library that I'd install for clients just so they didn't have to use the Roland colors.

And now, of course, in fairness to Roland and to their credit, they finally ponied up and paid the licensing for the actual full Pantone Library.

So I did have to go look to see, and sure enough, their colors are described as CMYK values and not as L*a*b*.

I guess given the nature of how that library was supposed to work, that would be okay, in that every color was supposed to be unique to its printed condition. But as anything trying to be in any way consistent, that would be a disaster.

However, as far as your samples go, I can assure you that the file you sent to Oce did not get printed as black only. From the looks of it, I'd say the one you printed didn't either, but from the way those colors are defined, I can't 100% be sure without seeing it in person.

(I am kind of curious though. If you want to send it to me, I'll let you know for sure. On the house.)

I've also not worked with nearly as many Roland flatbeds as solvents, so I can't speak as confidently about the consistency of their black ink; still I'd be willing to be that the issue you've got there is a profile issue, and not an ink issue.

 

[Brian27]

However, as far as your samples go, I can assure you that the file you sent to Oce did not get printed as black only. From the looks of it, I'd say the one you printed didn't either, but from the way those colors are defined, I can't 100% be sure without seeing it in person.

Those samples were actually printed by Roland. Sorry for the confusion. In December we were working with Roland to replace our Flatbed because it is a disaster of epic proportions. They were all set to send a replacement for the entire thing but then decided that my problems weren't just isolated to my printer and they duplicated those problems on theirs. So, they sent me those samples to essentially prove how crappy their demo prints as well. I just posted those to show how two machines printing the same file with the same settings and the same ink produced different hues of black...for whatever reason.

The Roland spot BK21-A is set to 0,0,0,100 in Versaworks so if it's not printing full K then I don't know how you ever could.

 

[DSC]

Hi Guys,

Like most digital printers, we are having a lot of problems printing greys. They come out looking green.

Has anyone got any tips, tricks or advice for hitting good greys.

Cheers

Jake

What inks are you using?

 

[SignMeUpGraphics]

Pretty sure he's running the IJ256 inkset.

 

[Correct Color]

Brian,

Those samples were actually printed by Roland. Sorry for the confusion. In December we were working with Roland to replace our Flatbed because it is a disaster of epic proportions. They were all set to send a replacement for the entire thing but then decided that my problems weren't just isolated to my printer and they duplicated those problems on theirs. So, they sent me those samples to essentially prove how crappy their demo prints as well. I just posted those to show how two machines printing the same file with the same settings and the same ink produced different hues of black...for whatever reason.

The Roland spot BK21-A is set to 0,0,0,100 in Versaworks so if it's not printing full K then I don't know how you ever could.

Okay, gotcha.

A couple things I can say though:

I really am curious about those prints from Roland, and just how Versaworks handles those Roland Spot colors. If they truly are just passed through Versa to the printer as raw CMYK values, then they're even lamer than I ever thought. But if it is the case that that's what they do, then that ink shift you showed is an amazing lack of quality control on the part of whoever makes their ink. Far worse than anything I have ever seen.

And since it's a pretty good bet that their ink is made by someone else and not them, I'd find that almost too much to believe. So my hunch would be that something else is going on.

I can say though that I've profiled many, many Oces over the years, and never seen any ink quality control issues with them. And they've got a good, deep black.

Note though that even then "black" is not a constant. "Black" will vary with resolution, and with media type. Typically the glossier the media, the better the black point, but even on the same machine, from media to media, no primary values are absolutes.

However, I just cannot over-emphasize that in printing greys, relying on black is a work-around for bad profiles, and creates its own problems. If you want to print good greys, you need excellent profiles. Profiles made in your environment on your machine. Everything else you see or read or hear is just a work-around for substandard profiles.

It's just as simple as that.