Best digital press for printing images that are not grainy

[raminmd]

Hi all,

We have two digital presses - Canon 7000VP and Canon 7010VP. The 7010 is only a year old.

For the most part, they work ok for what we print....postcards, brochures etc. Decent quality, sometimes great quality and we have no complaints.

However, we recently got a few big clients who are very particular about their print quality for flyers and brochures. Their biggest gripe is that the prints we produce are grainy and too "yellow". The "yellow" complaint is something we have had before with other clients. Anything "white" or light colored we produce out of the Canon seems to have a slightly yellowish tinge....e.g. a white wall looks whitish yellow. We calibrate every day and we let the printer determine colors when we send print jobs to the printer. As a clarification, we do see the graininess the client is talking about but for most of our clients, that is not a big issue.

Everything being printed is a high resolution PDF. When we look at the prints from afar, they look fine but when we look closely, the images are grainy and not smooth. We tried different papers and same issue.

Is this a press issue or a digital printing issue? Do we need to look at a different press for printing photographic quality images. We are at that point where we don't mind getting another press to help with printing for some of the clients who want photographic quality prints. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Possumgal]

Is the graininess all over or just in certain places? On all jobs or just some? Customer supplied PDFs? If it's just in certain places and the customer supplied the file, it could be that the customer supplied art was not up to par resolution wise.

 

[arossetti]

Are you targeting any print standard? Do your prints pass 12647-8?

 

[Craig]

Are you calibrating daily. It could be that you are seeing the serial number imprinting in yellow on the background?

 

[raminmd]

The graininess is on any picture that we print. It does not matter if it is our design or customer supplied.

We calibrate everyday. We do the shading adjustment and the print server calibration (sometimes more than once a day).

Forgive my ignorance but what do you mean by "if our print pass 12647-8"?

I also am not sure about the serial number comment. It just seems like any whites printed on the Canon have a slight yellowish tinge.

For 90% of our clients, both these issues are not major. They are hardly noticeable. For 10%, they are potential deal breakers. They want their prints to be perfectly smooth and of photographic quality.

 

[Craig]

Google search yellow dots on digital prints. Every machine will print a very small yellow dot patters that in essence is the serial number of that machine. This is per the US Treasury to help with anti-counterfeiting.

 

[arossetti]

If you are starting to get higher end clients you may want to look into moving away from "pleasing color" and move to an industry specification like Fogra, Gracol or just get a better understanding of color management. I would imagine that Canon has color management classes/resources to help if you can justify the expense.

 

[thebluesdude]

Hi, for what its worth we have owned, Oce, Xerox & Konica equipment the best but still grainy was the Xerox 5000 but after just testing lots of machines from Konica, Canon, Ricoh and Xerox it seems that things are starting to turn a corner, at least in the £60,000 and above market from what I have seen. Previously this market as well suffered grainy prints (when compared to litho or inkjet output)

 

[Mark Flanders]

Greetings,

Fussing around with color profiles for the paper you're using might help, but dry toner machines just look like that, in my admittedly biased opinion. The answer to your question is:

HP Indigo 7600. Expensive, but it takes the "pleasing-color" up to "happy-photographer" standard.

Mark

 

[dennis.matl]

We have the same press. Our press runs hot in yellow on some of our jobs. We then will manually reduce the yellow in the shading control on the machine.

Are these jobs on coated stock? We have had some coated stock that the coating would shift to a yellow or gray during a run. If you were to look at the first sheet versus last sheet you could see the color change.

I would start with the paper. Most of our work is done on a cheaper coated stock but we keep a premium digital coated stock for our "first class" jobs