Color Help on new Xerox

Hi. I am new here mainly because I am deeply frustrated. Let me explain where I'm at first, then my problem... We just purchased a new Xerox Altalink 8045 copier/printer/scanner in one for our business. We looked at the Altalink 8045, Xerox C70 and a Konica Minolta that is similar to the Altalink. We liked the C70 alot but chose a non production machine for now. Our major needs are scanning large jobs (we are completely paperless so we don't copy very much anymore), printing marketing materials for our business and some copying. Mainly, we wanted to use the booklet features for printing some of our business proposals and be able to print larger format and on thick card-stock for some other projects we send out of office. So for now, we chose the cheaper machine that will still do those, just to see if we will even use something like the booklets feature as much as we think we will. If we do, we will upgrade later on to the C70 production machine. I do alot of marketing design work that I send out for print so we felt like the Altalink would still give us a good print quality with most of the C70 features we would use for now in order to print our items in house.

So, to our problem - the color from this Xerox sucks! I am not one to just let the printer be on auto color like the sales people tried with me. I am one to calibrate my monitor, upload icc profiles for printers and paper, soft proof, and turn off color management - therefore allowing (for example) Photoshop or Illustrator to manage the colors. So I have spent weeks now looking for profiles online, only to learn that Xerox does not create and give profiles for any of their machines. WHY????? Or am I looking in the wrong place? The answer I have received (in a nutshell from the company that sold this to us) is that I need to play with my printer/copier settings enough that I tweak it until I get what I like on the color output, then save my own profile as to what I'd like to see "because everyone likes their prints to look differently". And all I want to scream back is, "no, i edit on screen. So I want my print to look like it does on both of my calibrated monitors and the other printer that prints it out correctly!" It's not difficult! If I let Photoshop manage colors, I get very gray, muted colors on this printer. It's awful! And yes, i have checked all the settings, nothing else is on...

So, my ultimate question to those of you that know this Xerox world because it is my first go round (and I wish I had asked this question first), but since there are no ICC profiles for Xerox, is a fiery server the only option for our problems? Everyone in our office is having trouble... literally, files with graphics we have printed for years are simply printing out grayish and muddy, even on Xerox auto color settings. So what do we do? Because most people in my office, don't have a clue about color management. And we feel like we have just purchased $16k in junk with no help from the company we bought from. I even asked about fiery and they just continue to waive me off that we don't need it. UGH! Help...

 

Nobody has an Altalink 8045 or experience with Xerox color issue similar to mine?

 

Is your photoshop in the default RGB color profile? If you could post an image of the file you're trying to print VS a picture of the print output, I might be able to help you a bit.

Photoshop is often problematic with color to begin with. As an RGB photo editing software, quite often it doesn't like being converted to CMYK. the conversions come out a bit drab. I take it you're not having issues with your Adobe Illustrator files?

 

Our xerox machines with fiery print servers came with baseline icc color profiles. You could look at datacolor or x-rite spectrameters to create your own color profiles of the actual machine on the stock you use.