Docucolor 252 Color issues

[dynamicprinter]

Hello everyone.
I'm new to this site, just signed up.
I'm currently leasing a Docucolor 252 w/standard rip and colorwise pro tools.
I calibrate once a week, machine prints great except when it comes to light shades especially blues - color not accurate. I print from a mac using Quark or various Adobe CS2 programs same problem no matter what program I use.
Anyone have any suggestions or with same experience?

 

[Jeff]

No experience yet but I just got a docucolor 242 today and will be trying this out to see.

How are you calibrating yours exactly?

 

[dynamicprinter]

Calibrating off the glass with the Kodak color and gray scale strips the were supplied.

 

[Jeff]

Thanks -- that's what I'm doing too. I've had mixed but pretty decent results simply using the colorcal page on my canons; I wanted to get the densometer option with my new 242 but I just couldn't swing it so I decided to stick with calibrating from the glass for now. I'm just getting warmed up on this new machine (embarrassed to say but I haven't even done a full autograd yet on the new machine; when I uncheck the circle for copy job calibration it won't let me continue so it must be on a different screen?) I'll be following this thread closely though and will hopefully come up with something useful to post in a bit when I get up to speed on the new machine.

 

[dynamicprinter]

I ran a Canon C3200 for about 4 years to try out my market.
The DC252 has the best prints from what I've seen from the competition.
I was originally going with the Konica 6500 but everyone around here was leasing them, so I decided to try and set myself apart from the rest.
I don't regret it, my 252 has higher resolution and so does my b/w 4595.
Doing more and more digital than on my little AB Dick.
Only down fall is I'm starting to get lazy and don't want to ink up the press.

 

[Jeff]

I'm just a little bit behind you -- I have a 3200 and a 3220 that I've put 1.5 million 11x17s on and now the 242 this week. I was also going to go with a Konica 5500 / IKON 550 because my highly-trusted tech recommended it as a well-built machine and because of its great registration, but I chose the Xerox because the finish quality is so superior to my eye - really enjoying having a nice gloss option in addition to matte on the laser. At first I thought the xerox looked a bit small and lightweight, but I'm liking it more and more and really appreciating the design, speed, and finish quality so far. If I can stop oogling over the beautiful gloss quality I should get to color accuracy soon!

 

[dynamicprinter]

Hey Jeff,
I ran Cannon copiers since '01 never had any problems, just couldn't afford anything to get me to the next level. I was think of the KM C6500 or 5500 but liked the quality from the Xerox better. Salesman from KM tried pushing the 8 bit vs 1 bit argument against the 600 vs 2400 dpi. I'm not that far into all this yet so I went with dpi. Even showed samples from all machines to some designer friends and they picked the Xerox over the others.
Choosing the Xerox (DC252 and 4595)I have no regrets, been very happy so far.
Do you run off a mac or pc?
I have the embedded rip and find at least with the mac there is a few little quirks with the print drivers.

 

[Jeff]

I'm on a pc and am also finding some major quirks with the print / rip drivers, but I can live with them as I'm really liking the sharpness and finish quality. First day I went to print from Coreldraw X3 and then CoreldarwX4 I found the xerox was creating black, gray, and white random "star" shapes covering 30% of the page which I had never seen before with my canon fierys. I then found a two-part patch that addressed this and applied it; all was fine on that issue, but now 11x17 landscape prints print on the sheet portrait rotated 90 degrees and cut off no matter what the print portrait/landscape setting from corel (so it seems the patch that fixed the major postscript error introduced this 90 degree rotation glitch), but if I print from acrobat it's ok which makes little sense to me (since I can print from the same corel application to the canons without issue) The workaround for this I discovered yesterday is to use the pagemaker ppd file, but then I lose the nice graphical user interface of the print driver and have to navigate all the options on one screen in alphabetical order, but it works well like this for some reason. (and I can just save multiple ppd files with my common settings once and then just use them from then on, so it will be ok.) Still very odd though, so I'm hoping that some new drivers/patches come down the chain to iron out these glitches once and for all. The printer itself is great so far.

 

[Jeff]

I haven't spent time with this yet so this is totally unscientific, but here's where I'm at on color vs. my existing IRC3200/3220's - getting very close with a tiny though almost imperceptible to the naked eye purple shift using the DC250 DCX+ Plain v3F cmyk profile in images sent as cmyk vs. the IRC3220/3200.

If I send RGB images (not really applicable to my workflow) I get a tiny bit of a blue green shift the other way vs. the canon with imagepass C2 RIP.

Red is truer Red on the xerox which I like.

I also find myself wanting to print at 90% light to match up with my existing canons which tended to have a somewhat weak black (like the added punch from the xerox now but want the two to match so I can run interchangeably if necessary)

Overall consistency is a lot better, though I am seeing some color shift / uneven gradient between dark and light blue in raster images - still have to look at this more to see if it's the image I'm sending being masked by the canons before or if I need to tweak something in the xerox driver to better handle the blue gradient.

Definitely enjoying the new docucolor a lot so far.

 

[iancc]

Hi we've got a Dc250 and DC240 and we've always had the same problem. We can't get a clean sky blue. As I've said elsewhere on this forum, when I asked a Xerox technician about this he said it was that the built in 'Colorcal' utility was not accurate enough. If we had got the much higher costing densitometer version the colour would be better as the device is more accurate than the scanner and also the test chart it scans is better.
Whether this was just an attempt to get me to upgrade I don't know.

 

[Jeff]

I'm pretty happy with my colors - since my budget isn't as large as I'd like, I can tweak them in my app slightly before sending cheaper than I can buy the densitometer option.

I did wonder if buying a used X-Rite DTP32 which sometimes go really cheap would be worthwhile since the Fiery utility would seem to allow calibration from this vs. colorcal... at least I don't see where an extra key is required to be entered to allow this (but maybe I'm missing something...)

 

[Jeff]

One thing that does annoy me a bit is that if I colorcal for coated2 on coated2 with tray set to coated2 and apply for coated 2and then want to run plain with tray set to plain on plain paper, for some reason the plain print is off. So I have to colorcal for plain, then apply to plain and I can run plain, but then coated2 is off until I colorcal again for coated2. (and likewise for coated1) It's as if my machine applies the profile to all stocks regardless of what you choose to colorcal for. It's not a big deal since it's fairly fast to colorcal, but it does seem to be a minor glitch for me.

 

[dynamicprinter]

I've learned a bit over the last several months with my DC252.
1) Certain colors don't reproduce well, I find lighter shades of blue on my machine.
2) Using Colorcal method make sure you calibrate scanner first before printer.
3) Color photo's leave in rgb - better color
4) When printing let the printer determine the colors not the program.
5) Color management helps a lot from what I have heard, I haven't gone that far yet. I'm selling everything as pleasing color for now and have had better results.

 

[dino]

Hey.

Your calibrations may not be accurate because the engine is not accurate. You need to perform an Auto Gradation Adjustment. This will calibrate the engine.

There is a table inside the engine that records a set ratio of developer v toner. This should be about 94% Developer 6% toner give or take a bit. If this "table" hasnt been updated no point doing a fiery calibration because the engine itself is wrong all you are doing is trying to bandaid a fault with your engine. If you havent done an Auto gradation for a while i would suggest to get your Xerox Tech in to clean the optics then do what is called an IIT calibration this is a service function, this will get your scanner calibrated then do a auto gradation adjustment. You should do an auto grad every day and a Fiery cal every month to 6 month depending on your output. Also you should do an auto grad after replacing a drum or changing paper stock types.

 

[k_graham]

I haven't spent time with this yet so this is totally unscientific, but here's where I'm at on color vs. my existing IRC3200/3220's - getting very close with a tiny though almost imperceptible to the naked eye purple shift using the DC250 DCX+ Plain v3F cmyk profile in images sent as cmyk vs. the IRC3220/3200.

If I send RGB images (not really applicable to my workflow) I get a tiny bit of a blue green shift the other way vs. the canon with imagepass C2 RIP.

Red is truer Red on the xerox which I like.

I also find myself wanting to print at 90% light to match up with my existing canons which tended to have a somewhat weak black (like the added punch from the xerox now but want the two to match so I can run interchangeably if necessary)

Overall consistency is a lot better, though I am seeing some color shift / uneven gradient between dark and light blue in raster images - still have to look at this more to see if it's the image I'm sending being masked by the canons before or if I need to tweak something in the xerox driver to better handle the blue gradient.

Definitely enjoying the new docucolor a lot so far.

Hi Jeff;

Interesting - I felt I had no problem with the EXP 250 external RIP but a couple days ago had a pdf with a sky transition from almost white to dark blue a client brought in as a file. In the sky I had some light magenta patches of about 1/2" across. Like you I've found 90% to be the sweet spot on Adobe though on Corel X4 I've been using 100% (but maybe should look more carefully at 90%) Anyway I blamed the spots on the low resolution file but it turned out the client had a copy optained from a internal RIP 242 with good gradient, but copy was likely ran at 100% and peoples faces were oversaturated, so he wanted my copy but wanted the sky as well. I did a Color Cal calibration but no improvement. Then tried it on my older slower Xerox Docucolor 12 - perfect. So ran the job on Doc 12, made extra copy so client would leave me competitors sample and called Xerox tech in.

Xerox tech has blamed it on the Image Belt Transfer Cleaner but had used his so had to order one - due in next Monday. Fact is we continued using copier on other jobs and next day got grey streak on a black job so the Image Transfer Belt cleaner probably does require replacement but I don't think its the problem.

On EFI website is a thread on copier toner vs desired curve.

http://fieryforums.efi.com/showthread.php?t=1313

The curve is supposed to be 10% lower at 100% than available copier toner so the toner line can be pulled down by the Fiery to match the desired curve.

On mine 2 colors are below curve a bit and 2 above so I thought this may be the answer.

However looking at last post on this about needing a Spectro - I realize I used a DPT Densitometer on the doc 12 and off the Glass calibration Color Cal on the 240 so after my Image transfer belt cleaner is installed I plan to rerun the sheet using the DPT Densitometer used for the Doc12. I may be mistaken with the letters DPT - its the Densitometer meant for the Doc12 and is also compatible to the 240 but I never observed any difference between the 2 - possibly until now.

By the way I found it very important when using Corel X4 to check a box in the color calibration Window - I think its bottom left that causes Color to work same way as in Corel 12 otherwise colors on X4 are muted.



Ken


I

 

[Jeff]

One thing that does annoy me a bit is that if I colorcal for coated2 on coated2 with tray set to coated2 and apply for coated 2and then want to run plain with tray set to plain on plain paper, for some reason the plain print is off. So I have to colorcal for plain, then apply to plain and I can run plain, but then coated2 is off until I colorcal again for coated2. (and likewise for coated1) It's as if my machine applies the profile to all stocks regardless of what you choose to colorcal for. It's not a big deal since it's fairly fast to colorcal, but it does seem to be a minor glitch for me.

Maybe I'm looking right at it, but after having the docucolor 242 for a year now I don't see an option when running the fiery colorcal calibration from the machine's GUI to not apply to the calibration to all types. For a few months I was doing this and wondering why it was affecting all media: on the docucolor's GUI I'd go to web applications, calibrate, select plain for example, print, go to network scanning, color cal, scan, then back to web applications and acquire. Then it would say "successful" with the only option to continue, then the next screen has only the option to cancel or apply (no advanced options or other). When I clicked apply I would then find it affects not only plain but also coated, heavyweight, etc. which is odd because you begin by selecting the type you're calibrating for... The solution for me has been to stop calibrating the fiery from the 242's gui itself, but instead do it through command workstation where it presents me with a checkbox option (which I leave unchecked) to apply the calibration to all media, allowing me to calibrate only plain with the plain print scan, only coated with the coated print scan, etc. Odd that the machine's own gui doesn't have this option, but no problem once I realized it existed in command workstation.

 

[SkyTech]

iancc your tech is spot on. I am an ISO who works on xerox as well and the densitometer is the only true way to calibrate your colors. The generic grey scale off the glass procedure is a joke. Densitometers are very very expensive but they are obtainable on the used market. Alot of the older 2060/2045 etc came with them and since these are being replaced on a daily basis with dpi machines they are out there to be had. I would be checking your 3rd party xerox supply houses for used ones.