Xerox Docucolor 260 Colour Problems

[tombombadil]

Hi,

I work as a graphic designer within a local government design and print department.

Our print room currently uses a Xerox Docucolor 260 for printing large runs of internal government documents and for colour photocopying.

Our main problem is that the machine doesn't seem capable of printing accurate colours from an Adobe Acrobat PDF, originated in QuarkXpress using the PDF 7.0 virtual printer. On printouts, 100% magenta, cyan and yellow always appear too dark. Cyan looks like a petrol blue, magenta looks too red and yellow looks like a mustard colour. Tints look awful.

When the engineer photocopies his CMYK test swatch, the printout looks accurate enough, but when anybody prints from professionally produced artwork through the Fiery, the colours are all wrong.

The Xerox engineer couldn't tell us why this happens or how to print accurate colours from a PDF and said we would have to pay extra (on top of our lease) to find out from head office. They have now informed us that they don't know either.

Does anybody else out there have the same problem? It seems ridiculous that this should be happening, especially when all of our old laser printers (Epson AcuLaser C8600) work perfectly fine are are very colour accurate. A machine that costs as much as the Docucolor 260 should be giving us better results, surely?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Tom

 

[lfelton]

Hi,

I work as a graphic designer within a local government design and print department.

Our print room currently uses a Xerox Docucolor 260 for printing large runs of internal government documents and for colour photocopying.

Our main problem is that the machine doesn't seem capable of printing accurate colours from an Adobe Acrobat PDF, originated in QuarkXpress using the PDF 7.0 virtual printer. On printouts, 100% magenta, cyan and yellow always appear too dark. Cyan looks like a petrol blue, magenta looks too red and yellow looks like a mustard colour. Tints look awful.

When the engineer photocopies his CMYK test swatch, the printout looks accurate enough, but when anybody prints from professionally produced artwork through the Fiery, the colours are all wrong.

The Xerox engineer couldn't tell us why this happens or how to print accurate colours from a PDF and said we would have to pay extra (on top of our lease) to find out from head office. They have now informed us that they don't know either.

Does anybody else out there have the same problem? It seems ridiculous that this should be happening, especially when all of our old laser printers (Epson AcuLaser C8600) work perfectly fine are are very colour accurate. A machine that costs as much as the Docucolor 260 should be giving us better results, surely?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Tom

Hi Tom,

The 260 is capable of _reasonable_ colour accuracy, but I wouldn't use it as a proofer for instance.

You don't mention whether you are calibrating your machine, but obviously it's important to do that for colour accuracy. I'd suggest upgrading to a spectrophotometer, which will give you more accurate readings for the calibration.

As far as the rest goes, it sounds as though the issue may well be training related. These machines (or more specifically the RIP) are more complex to set up than a simple colour laser and hence there's a lot more room to go wrong with the configuration, colour management etc.

When the machine was new, you will probably have paid for installation and training. If the training wasn't done, then you know what to do! If it was and whoever got trained originally has moved job, then you need to consider paying for some more training I'm afraid. From memory, the training (about a half day) is around £400ish. If you order more training, make sure that Xerox know that you specifically need RIP training, otherwise you'll spend the whole time learning how to use the photocopier functionality!

Hope that helps a bit.


If it really is long runs then you should also consider subbing it out to a commerical printer with production equipment. I doubt whether that would end up costing you a whole lot more and you'll get a better result and much less stress! (We're only 40 minutes away from you ).

 

[tombombadil]

Thanks for the reply

Thanks for the reply

Ifelton,

Thanks for the reply.

I've forwarded this to the print room supervisor. He's now discussing this with the managers who ordered the machine and Xerox.

Regards,
Tom

 

[smatros]

When printing use the suitable profiles (for example SWOP with relative colometric color setting). MAybe the currently chosen profile is weird and causes such effect.
In general colors on Xerox appear a bit darker, but far from the problem you describe.
Try also to verify how the files are made, sometimes color mistakes happen on screen.

 

[Creative-1]

Our Xerox tends to print dark as well. We usually send it out with brightness set to 95% or less. Also, in the expert color settings on the fiery, if it is set to photographic rendering, that seems to make the prints darker. Set to presentation or play around with the other settings to see what works best for you.

 

[Elgane]

One thing, when you print, if the printer is setup correctly, make sure you select : printer color management, meaning, let the printer decide what profile it uses, if you are sending it a weird profile then that will change the colors alot.