Duplex printing color and black on DC250

[Ihsaan]

If I printed a job and left the color mode to CMYK instead of greyscale and the one side of the document is only black text, would the Xerox 250 regard it is black or colour since it usually picks up whether a document is black or color.

 

[wonderings]

If I printed a job and left the color mode to CMYK instead of greyscale and the one side of the document is only black text, would the Xerox 250 regard it is black or colour since it usually picks up whether a document is black or color.

If the file is only black on one side, it will print only black. You have to watch the crop marks though, if they are created through indesign they are cmyk. You can also check how the job is printing in the job status on the DC250s screen. It will show printing side 1 colour and side to show black, or vice versa depending on the file.

 

[Possumgal]

There's an exception to this. It may not be applicable in your case, but I've seen it in the 700 and 700i. We had a piece of clip art that was 100% K black on an all-black job, and it triggered a color click. It was a piece of vector artwork from Illustrator. When I changed the document setting to grayscale, it printed as a black click. Even some techs are stumped by this. They've seen it happen but can't explain it.

I don't know if it happens with other Adobe programs such as InDesign, but I haven't seen it in a Photoshop file. From now on, I'm clicking grayscale in Command Work Station, and checking over files like yours that are color on one side and black on the other. You can check the log file in Command Work Station to see how a job is printing. It will show color and black clicks on each job. That's how I found out what it was doing.

 

[pippip]

We have a DC242 with creo and I would note that if I tell it to print as grayscale on the creo it prints images considerably darker than they should be. I now use acrobat to convert to grayscale and its much better.

Maybe others can tell me if they expericence the same.

 

[Ihsaan]

I've got a fiery and I was monitoring the meter I noticed that it registered black pages as black and color as color. I guess we just need to be certain the its truely black without any smaller CMYK elements on the page. Thanks for your input guys

 

[gig0]

I now use acrobat to convert to grayscale and its much better.

Careful. That convert colors option won't convert the marks to grayscale anymore, which was a backwards decision by Adobe. A simple Pitstop action fixes all of it with one click.

EDIT: Separation "ALL" can also be fixed within Acrobat via Preflight but it's still just an added step.

 

[jinthebay]

I think Ihsaan's real question was whether he needed to address each page in perhaps a collated book let's just say. If you know it's printing all grayscale, then yes, you can change your color mode to grayscale (on the Fiery at least; not sure about other RIPS). But what if your collated book has some colour pages but prints mostly 1/1 black? The easiest thing to do is just let it print as colour. But then you're paying for all of those extra impressions. Is converting just the B/W pages to grayscale in Pitstop the only option? Imagine a 346 page book with 10% of the pages in colour. VERY tedious work indeed.

 

[wonderings]

If the file is made correctly then it will print colour when there is colour and only black when black. I generally check separations when jobs like this come in. Will turn off the black separation and scan through the document. Never had a black file print colour on our old DC260.

 

[Possumgal]

I specifically checked all black art placed into various files. The art was 100% K in Illustrator, but apparently there are two types of 100% black in Illustrator. If you have 100% K with CMYK sliders in the color palette, it may register as a color click, even thought there is absolutely nothing color in the file. If you only have a black slider, that's Illustrator's greyscale black and it's safe.

I don't know if this applies to any machines other than the 700, but it's worth checking out if you have a Xerox.

 

[wonderings]

I specifically checked all black art placed into various files. The art was 100% K in Illustrator, but apparently there are two types of 100% black in Illustrator. If you have 100% K with CMYK sliders in the color palette, it may register as a color click, even thought there is absolutely nothing color in the file. If you only have a black slider, that's Illustrator's greyscale black and it's safe.

I don't know if this applies to any machines other than the 700, but it's worth checking out if you have a Xerox.

Never had that with any image placed in indesign from illustrator, even with CMYK sliders and only black on 100% and everything else at zero. Maybe it is a "unique" feature of the 700.