Roland XC-540 Gray Printing

[Luddrigo]

Hi!

We usually do our designs in Corel Draw X5 and we have a huge problem printing gray colors. They always turn out a bit purple. I have used the Roland swatch in the past to just switch out PMS Cool Gray-colors (or whatever gray color is giving me problem) but lately I see a big amount of banding in the prints. They are simply not acceptable anymore. After consulting with a Roland tech and sending him some test prints he advised us to change the black print head and we have that scheduled for monday.

I dug around in the Versaworks software and found something strange. I usually send my Corel-designed files exported to PDF with native colors and ICC-profile embedded. But when I do that with Cool Gray 8 C I can see that the little preview window that it will print it purple and it surely does. If I convert the design to CMYK before opening it in Versaworks it gets better. Sometimes a little purple, other times a little green. The tech guy told me that the bad black print head could be to blame for that.

Anyhow, I don't know why Versaworks translate Cool Gray to C:39.3 M:55.1 Y:38.1 K:0.0 but I would like to. I have tried almost all of the different profiles and they all end up like that. Not exactly the same numbers but almost.

I have worked at this place for about 3 years and under that time we never have any calibration done. My boss "thinks" that someone did something a long time ago but what and why he don't remember.

I want to have this fixed, I need to be able do send customer made designs straight into the Roland, print and be happy.

After the print head have been replaced I have sent for our office technician who has a EFI ES-1000 which he tells me will be able to create custom ICC-profiles for out different materials.

Pleaase advice, I have attached screenshots of what I believe is the relevant settings. Sorry for any grammatical errors - I am swedish.

 

[bttweb]

try this if it makes sense

http://support.rolanddga.com/docs/D...vices/Manuals and Guides/rvw_printinggrey.pdf

from my experience, grey in a 4 ink system will either have a touch of purple or green in it. thats the reason its good to print
with an LG or light grey ink system.

 

[Luddrigo]

try this if it makes sense

http://support.rolanddga.com/docs/D...vices/Manuals and Guides/rvw_printinggrey.pdf

from my experience, grey in a 4 ink system will either have a touch of purple or green in it. thats the reason its good to print
with an LG or light grey ink system.

Thank you!

I will look into this when I have the calibration tool in my hand even tough it's not listed in the preferences. My idea was something in the line of printing a load of calibration sheets on all the materials I use, create profiles and then use my new profiles when printing. But until I have a new head installed I think any work done now will render useless when the tech guy does his super-secret-calibration-install voodoo.

I have a feeling something else is wrong too, not just the black head.

 

[matthewsteven9]

This may or may not work. According to this website: http://euro-bags.eu/pantone?limit=60&p=10 that cool gray color has a value of C:0 M:1 Y:5 K:39. You can try and just make the color a percentage of black. I would try C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:40 instead of a pantone color. It seems like your color management has a hard time with pantones and making the color a simple black value may work. Make sure your setting in Corel for pdf's is cmyk. I hope this helps.

 

[Luddrigo]

This may or may not work. According to this website: http://euro-bags.eu/pantone?limit=60&p=10 that cool gray color has a value of C:0 M:1 Y:5 K:39. You can try and just make the color a percentage of black. I would try C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:40 instead of a pantone color. It seems like your color management has a hard time with pantones and making the color a simple black value may work. Make sure your setting in Corel for pdf's is cmyk. I hope this helps.

That worked somewhat ok, but due to semi-bad black head the gray got really grainy and with a lot of banding. Same result when trying the Roland colors that use only the black ink. I have a somewhat critical printing job next week (local firm got new logo, need all their cars redone) that I hope I can get out by tampering with some sort of gray mix but I would rather not have to do that on every job.

When I set my PDF's to CMYK it gets better, still a little pinkish in shop but better outside so all hope is not lost. I just need to figure out why Versaworks seems to think that dark purple is a great color to print for Cool Gray 8. I do have a sample from the firm that did the new logo, one PMS and one CMYK logo and the grays are miles apart. My best bet is probably to print a sh!tload of samples and let the customer decide.

I will show this to the tech guy on monday and maybe he has some sort of fix for it.