canon 3220 c1 rip -- awesome colors -- not so awesome Grayscale

[tmbusby]

Our canon Imagerunner 3220 has always produced perfect colors. And setting colors to whatever our Color chart has is plenty accurate for the swop coat cmyk - -

Cannot seem to get grays when printing Blk only like we would like.

We actually printed a football program last year on the 3220 because of not having time to run plates for offset.

(2) questions :

1 - Is there a trick to getting great gray scales on this machine???
2 - can the c1 rip be updated to a c2 with the fiery software or is it strictly a hardware issue??

I did here of some problems from somewhere else that the gray scale was a problem with the rip in the early version that may or might not have been corrected. -- ** From the glass, it retains all color & dots. So we have had to run grays from a monochrome laser printer then layout on glass for 11 x 17 for gray scale. also Gray scale looks great using cmyk method but who wants to pay for that????

Thanks For any Help

Mike

 

[Jeff]

Can you post a scan of what a grayscale image looks like printed through your C1 RIP? Or describe what exactly is wrong with them?

We got our C1 + 3200 in the fall of 2003 and I've always considered B/W prints printed through it to be better than directly from the glass. I don't think it's particulraly strong for B/W (the black toner itself isn't as black as other printers, there is some jitter in medium gray solids that comes and goes, and the black drums print the best tonal range from 0 to 50% of yeild and then the remaining 50-200% of yeild we use for text and color pages)

I don't know what might be possible with reloading the RIP if you could get your hands on the software; our C2 hardware is noticably faster though, but I suppose if you could hack C2 software onto a C1 RIP you could probably upgrade the hardware. I heaven't heard from anyone who has done this and ours are under contract so we obviously can't, but if we ever had one out of contract it would be fun for example to put a 10k raptor hard drive in the C2 as well as lots more RAM!

 

[tmbusby]

thats true "don't want to mess up contract"

I have the c2 software & ours is built on a linux os. But I would not want to fool with anything that could get us in serious trouble

 

[Jeff]

My suspicion would be that EFI would carefully lock their installer to prevent people from "upgrading" when they get so much $,$$$ for each new RIP hardware + software combination. But I truely just don't know as I assumed it would be a real no-no to try and circumvent the normal upgrade pricing (and feared that doing anything along those lines would void my support for it) so I never specifically asked a tech.

Unless I missed an early bad version of the C1 I would think there would be an easier solution as grayscale prints very very similar on our C1 as our C2 (though big files are 3x as fast to RIP on our C2 but I attribute that to the slight upgrade in hardware specs.)

 

[tmbusby]

Post a photo gray

Do you have any pictures that have been converted directly from a color photo jpeg (Like from a photographer_) that you converted to gray yourself. I have tried many methods & have had the most recent success with a program from Nik Software called Silver Efex Pro. Getting a nice smooth photo on my 3220 going through the latest c1 PS software --.

We do run smart plates on our canon 3220 for offset press which requires a different dot pattern. But I know that is an animal all to itself. So just stay with the prints directly from the canon for finish product.

What do you use for your offset presses. Film, Metal Plates, Poly - --

We have a silver master - use poly on laser printers - still have a dark room (Very seldom used only on long long runs with Lots of screens) - also an Old Pressmate FS.

Thinking about getting some type of xante solution -- I would hate to just get a plate maker 5 and it be for only a certain thing But I have seen some of the best half tones ever. We have a dealer hear in South AL.

That is alot & some off topic so For times sake , just reply to the grays on the canon 3220 if possible. (Unless someone has the time.)

Mike

 

[Jeff]

We're on the same page!

I just downloaded Silver Efex Pro two days ago and installed it yesterday and have been liking what I'm getting with it quite a bit. (I've used Nikon Capture and now Nik Capture NX2 for a while now for digital photography raw file developing which is how I found Silver Efex.)

I first started doing grayscale conversions using Photoshop's Channel Mixer. Then CS3 added the BW conversion which is basically the same but saves me a click.

There's also a free plugin called Virtual Photographer which can sometimes be quite good -- it has a variety of presets from very harsh "anvil" to some satin conversions to "diffuse" which can be flattering sometimes. When I use this I usually end up applying 2 or 3 of these presets to duplicate layers, and then setting a % transparency for each, or adjusting the blend mode to screen even sometimes, to get the exact look I'm after. More time consuming than SIlver Efex though.

I've also sometimes combined the channel mixer (usually red filtered) and a light application of the lucis art exposure/whyeth filter for non-human photos, but it's easy to overdo this and it's very much an acquited taste. If done conservatively it generates a look along the lines of Silver Efex high structure conversion.

With the combination of these I can get reasonably good grayscales though from both the C2+3220/C1+3200. For me either off the glass or with a straight color to grayscale conversion the 3200 is a bit flat, and if I end up with too much medium gray area in any large areas, when doing a run I get intermittent gear jitter from the 3200 (lines in the 11" direction). If I do a bw conversion that is more dramatic I get much better results from the 3200.

 

[Jeff]

In terms of the good, the bad, and the ugly, here's how our IRC 3200 / C1 RIP outputs a bw test page with the black drum at 63% of yeild.

 

[Rick Shearer]

Pressmate

Do you have any pictures that have been converted directly from a color photo jpeg (Like from a photographer_) that you converted to gray yourself. I have tried many methods & have had the most recent success with a program from Nik Software called Silver Efex Pro. Getting a nice smooth photo on my 3220 going through the latest c1 PS software --.

We do run smart plates on our canon 3220 for offset press which requires a different dot pattern. But I know that is an animal all to itself. So just stay with the prints directly from the canon for finish product.

What do you use for your offset presses. Film, Metal Plates, Poly - --

We have a silver master - use poly on laser printers - still have a dark room (Very seldom used only on long long runs with Lots of screens) - also an Old Pressmate FS.

Thinking about getting some type of xante solution -- I would hate to just get a plate maker 5 and it be for only a certain thing But I have seen some of the best half tones ever. We have a dealer hear in South AL.

That is alot & some off topic so For times sake , just reply to the grays on the canon 3220 if possible. (Unless someone has the time.)

Mike

Do you still have the Pressmate FS for sale?