Good Day All,

I have have a bit of a dilemma here and am hoping someone can shed some light on this.

Background - I work at an agency for a specific client whos brand dictates that most of the art have a large coverage of black. All of the ads have black backgrounds.

We deal with a lot of vendors (collateral, magazine, newspaper), and after much study, came to a black breakdown of 15c 0m 0y 100k for the best overall use.

Internally we keep that black as we produce 1000+ ads a week and its keeps the flow going. We have a lot of gradients, fades set to 15/0/0/100 and Vendors usually change if necessary, but overall we find it to be a very nice mix with acceptance of over the 200+ vendors we have. Even copy centers.

We attach NO color PROFILE.

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Problem - Due to budgetay issues. One of the client divisions bought a imagePRESS C7000VP to start printing flyers in house.

Now they are saying that the 15/0/0/100 breakdown is causing the blacks to come out LIGHTER, almost grey, and they are requested straight 100k.

Now I have been in print production for about 15 years and something here is screaming end user.

We use a lot of transparencies, so that may be one problem, but I am sure there is an overprint, rich black or color profile etting somehwere they are overlooking. They are slo opening up our PDFs in illustrator and resaving them, which is another red flag for me, especially if they are not paying attention to color profiles. They should be using another preflight tool.

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Has anyone had experice with this color printer and rich/non-rich black issues.
Can you suggest something?


Thank you in advance.

Without seeing the resulting files that they are ending up with after their convoluted process to get the file to the RIP it is hard to say, but I agree that it is more than likely end user related.

The reason I say this is that the EFI controller* has an optional 'Rich Black' setting that turns all 100%K to 50%C100%K, and that creates a real solid black! If you are using 15%C100%K then you should just get a slighter denser black than what you get with 100%K - from my experience with the C7000 it should not get getting lighter...

The EFI controllers do ship with Pitstop, so they could correct the black in this if they really want 100%K (providing the black is within vector objects rather than images)

*Obviously I am assuming that they are using an EFI controller as that is what I am familiar with.