Canon 3220 copier color problems

[Wren]

I am working with a mac, quark xpress and canon 3220 color printer. Sometimes when I print a document with a solid black background on glossy card stock it prints shiny & solid black, and in the same run the black changes color so it not shiny and not dark black. I would like it to print shiny dark black all the time. Any suggestions? My machine is on service contract so I have new drums etc. all the time.
Thanks

 

[Jeff]

With our canon irc 3220 and the irc 3200 before it (same machine for all practical purposes) we were/are never able to get very shiny/glossy finish. The toner is always flat. When first starting a run, the first few prints are a bit more shiny but as the paper continues to pass and I presume cool the fuser the prints get very matte within 10 prints. I always thought this was by design.

In terms of black, we haven't experienced the black density changing much during a run, but to get a black black we frequently have to manually adjust the black density (additional functions, printer settings, density, black) a few clicks darker to get a nice dark consistent solid, especially once our drums are over 30%. Also if possible we print a rich black rather than a pure black on the 3220/3200 as the black is a bit weak on these printers compared to our other machines (not very black black compared to our previous generation canons or our xerox)

 

[mariae]

Hi, I need to buy a printer for printing 12"x18". Do you have any recommendations for me? Thank you.

 

[Jeff]

Are you looking at a great price on a used 3220? If so I wouldn't have major reservations. It's 6 year old technology now, but our 3220s are still running strong, one with 550,000 and one with over 1 million 11x17 and 12x18 prints. What is its weakness, a bit weak on the black, also gives the 3220 quite a pleasing look on color prints. The best way I could describe it is if you took your vision of a laser print and a watercolor painting of the same print and overlaid them in photoshop with the watercolor about 5% opacity. It has just a hint of that, the kind of color subtlety, that makes the prints quite pleasing. The drawbacks of the 3220 are that the consumables can be a bit pricer than other machines (e.g. with both machines set to output gcr to let each rip do the gcr, a job that takes 6 toners rated for 30,000 prints on our xerox takes 11 toners rated for 25,000 prints on the canon irc3220.) More expensive, if you print large solids, the canon drums will lose the ability to print a perfect even solid once they reach about 50% yield. Not noticable if the output is photographic or contains a texture, but if you have large backgrounds of a solid color, it can cause you to have to swap drums to get it to look nice. The only functional drawback of the 3220 after a million prints is that there is some gear jitter that comes and goes and affects medium grays - it appeared on both our machines after 100,000 prints and a tech could never track it down - it's just a quality of the machine. It doesn't affect most general purpose prints though. On a positive note, the design of the 3220 is nice and sealed, modular, and they keep on going and going.

 

[Kwame]

Great explanation Jeff. However I will like to know on the average how many prints you get before you refill the tonner of the 3220. Do you think the 1160/1180 is more impressive with print quality and less expensive to run?

 

[Jeff]

We never refilled toner on our 3200 or 3220s - our machines were/are under contract so we first ran only OEM canon toner and now IKON has switched us to Katun toner which comes in the Katun's version of the OEM cartridges. Off the top of my head, I would say on average we get around 2,500 to 3,500 11x17 or 12x18 prints per cartridge on the canon 3200/3220 with what we print.

 

[Jeff]

Do you think the 1160/1180 is more impressive with print quality and less expensive to run?

I really don't think the CLC 1160/1180 will be less expensive to run, though I don't have any first hand experience with one. When we were first looking back in 2003, if I remember right, the expectation was that service would be required every 25,000 prints. The click rates would have been 30% to 50% higher for us on a CLC than on an IRC3200 back then which I believe reflected the greater service requirement. In contrast, our IRC 3220 and 3200 have only needed service maybe every 150,000 to 200,000 11x17 prints; we've had to have the ITB belt changed a few times, had vertical path film cause a problem, two paper feed modules from the cassettes, and one major service early on where our main drive gears sheared. But for 1.5+ million 11x17s now, that's not too bad in my opinion.