SHARP MX6240N and Samsung Multipress X7600LX

[lexcreate]

I have a book document created in InDesign that is 90% black (k black not cmyk black) and about 10% colour. When I create the PDF and use the print production tools and view the output, I see that the colour vs. black and white is accurate. When I print to either printer listed about, it doesn't accurately distinguish between CMYK and black (k) and prints the document as 90% colour and 10% black. The SHARP is supposed to detect the difference, but clearly is doing a bad job of it. The Samsung doesn't even have an auto colour option. There doesn't seem to be an option to choose black and white for most pages and hand-picking the colour pages. I don't want to pay for colour pages that aren't colour in my document. HELP!

 

[Dov Isaacs]

Are these printers PostScript (or maybe better articulated "CloneScript) printers or some other page description language?

If not PostScript, applications including Acrobat print to the printers via RGB which then depends upon the driver and/or printer to properly convert back to the device colors, i.e. CMYK. If the printer does support PostScript but you are printing to PCL or some other protocol, switch to PostScript.

- Dov

 

[mangcang]

Are these printers PostScript (or maybe better articulated "CloneScript) printers or some other page description language?

If not PostScript, applications including Acrobat print to the printers via RGB which then depends upon the driver and/or printer to properly convert back to the device colors, i.e. CMYK. If the printer does support PostScript but you are printing to PCL or some other protocol, switch to PostScript.

- Dov

great explanation...

 

[lexcreate]

Thank you for the explanation. It makes sense now. The Samsung doesn't have PS capabilities. The SHARP does, but the images, especially imported .eps images from Illustrator look blurry or fuzzy compared to when printing to the PCL6 driver. The PS driver distinguished the colour vs. black and white accurately, but clarity is an issue. I do not have a Fiery RIP on the SHARP. Is it worth investigating? There has to be a way to print to PS and have the clarity or crispness of the PCL6 driver. Any suggestions?

 

[Guest]

What type of PDF are you writing, then sending?

 

[lexcreate]

High quality print or PDF X/1A. I usually don't create PS files through distiller, but maybe that should be a regular practice.

 

[Guest]

I have really good luck sending X/1A 2001. If I'm supplied a generic PDF of any other sort I distill it to X1A. In your output preview have you toggled the profile to make sure it's not an rgb black? Any crop marks that might be reg. black? There are also times I'll have to manually convert the PDF pages to 1.8 Gray and hand convert color pages to color, then distill again as X1A just as a good measure- Creative CLoud ID is famous for causing havoc like this. Wish I were more help! TGIF!

 

[lexcreate]

Thanks for your feedback. It is all helpful.

 

[Dov Isaacs]

I have really good luck sending X/1A 2001. If I'm supplied a generic PDF of any other sort I distill it to X1A. In your output preview have you toggled the profile to make sure it's not an rgb black? Any crop marks that might be reg. black? There are also times I'll have to manually convert the PDF pages to 1.8 Gray and hand convert color pages to color, then distill again as X1A just as a good measure- Creative CLoud ID is famous for causing havoc like this. Wish I were more help! TGIF!

I'm sorry, but this is really bad advice!

First of all, if you have a PDF file that you want to change to PDF/X-1a or any other PDF standard, there are facilities directly in Acrobat Pro for such conversions. “Refrying” a PDF file (i.e., printing to PostScript and then distilling same back to PDF) is a potentially very lossy process since the PostScript generated by Acrobat is optimized for direct printing, not for creation of PDF.

Furthermore PDF/X-1a is a fairly obsolete standard, since it doesn't support either live transparency or ICC color management! A better choice is to directly create PDF/X-4 with live transparency and with ICC color management (don't convert to CMYK). Direct PDF RIPs/DFEs (including those using the Adobe PDF Print Engine as well as those using Global Graphic's Harlequin technologies) and even printing to a PostScript printer using Acrobat or Reader will always print PDF/X-4 with higher quality and reliability than the equivalent PDF/X-1a file if the original content had any live transparency or non-CMYK colors. Given that the book being described by lexcreate is using InDesign, on behalf of Adobe, I would recommend direct PDF export using the PDF/X-4 joboptions!

- Dov

 

[Craig]

By chance are you printing with crop/registration marks?

 

[lexcreate]

No, not this job. The two books I was printing didn't have crop/registrations marks and it was mixed black text and graphics.
Update: I was sent a PS driver for the Samsung. That works as far as separating the colours properly. Too bad it was after the jobs ran :-(

With the SHARP, I had to experiment with some of the graphics. The .EPS (illustrator) files were incredibly blurry. I had to export them as pdfs (PDF/X-4 as recommended above) and re-insert the graphics. When I printed the book using the PS printer, it was improved and did accurately separate the colours. The black text on the 15% grey background has a glow around it though. I didn't add that at all. I'll be speaking with the sales rep and the IT person this week. I find it a bit crazy that the PS printer driver produces poor quality compared to the PCL6.

In future, I probably would not recommend the SHARP. We don't have big print runs anymore so it made sense economically at the time. The Samsung was our back-up. The quality is better with that machine. If anyone can recommend a good production machine, that would be welcome. We have used Konica-Minolta in the past.

Thanks for the comments folks. Much appreciated.

 

[Tim-Ellis]

Hello,

Our German sister company had a similar issue with their Konica presses. They had a greyscale black text in a pdf file that printed as you described. The workflow they built had an unexpected RGB conversion in it. Did you solve the problem in the end?
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[lexcreate]

The problem was not solved. It was with a Sharp printer. I find the conversion to RGB quite sneaky and doesn't make me feel confident in trusting the print companies.