Konica Minolta can't print orange?

[Marlonmegaphon]

Hello all. We have had a Konika Minolta Accurio Press C4070 in our print shop for two years. At the beginning everything went well, but then we suddenly had problems when orange areas were to be printed. We always have a lot of red dots in these colour areas, which looks very unattractive. According to the technicians, the problem exists on many Konika machines, always when yellow and red toner mix. They then adjusted the tension settings for toner transfer a little, but that didn't really make much of a difference. Surely it can't be that a machine in this price range can't do this? Are there people who have the same problem or even know of a solution to this problem?

 

[kslight]

I think it’ll be helpful if you define how you’re creating orange - is it a spot color (which one) or process (what is the build), what program you’re creating it in, is it a problem across all papers, and do you have samples of printing this color on this machine correctly before? Is this particular orange outside of gamut?

What happens when you print cmyk halftone test patterns - any discernible issues in these colors? Have you tried different settings on your fiery?

I don’t have this machine or any Konica any more, but if it was me Konica should have the ability to print this file on another machine (either at another shop in town or demo room or at an engineering facility) to isolate if this is a problem with your machine or all of them or if it’s a file issue. It would not be acceptable to me for a two year old machine to suddenly not be able to print this color if it previously printed it fine.

Perhaps you should also post a sample file for other people here to test.

 

[Marlonmegaphon]

I think it’ll be helpful if you define how you’re creating orange - is it a spot color (which one) or process (what is the build), what program you’re creating it in, is it a problem across all papers, and do you have samples of printing this color on this machine correctly before? Is this particular orange outside of gamut?

What happens when you print cmyk halftone test patterns - any discernible issues in these colors? Have you tried different settings on your fiery?

I don’t have this machine or any Konica any more, but if it was me Konica should have the ability to print this file on another machine (either at another shop in town or demo room or at an engineering facility) to isolate if this is a problem with your machine or all of them or if it’s a file issue. It would not be acceptable to me for a two year old machine to suddenly not be able to print this color if it previously printed it fine.

Perhaps you should also post a sample file for other people here to test.

Thank you very much for the feedback. The orange was always built in CMYK. We tested different combinations of magenta and yellow with the same result. If you print the magenta and yellow colours separately, they look fine. Also, the problem persists on different papers. We have also tested different settings in Fiery - without success. I like the idea of testing a test file on another printer. There is another print shop in my town with the same machine - that would be interesting.

 

[JeffJ]

One possibility could be the change in the magenta toner they had. I saw a big difference in my red colors. Not sure I print a lot of oranges but my reds tend to be on the purple side and I usually have to take out some cyan.

 

[Marlonmegaphon]

Thank you for the feedback. Yes, I also noticed that magenta is no longer the same, but that shouldn't cause these red dots in the orange ...

 

[YourCastle]

is this a large flooded area? I see dots in my various projects for a flood color. I adjust the transfer voltage to find a better flood (i'm using xerox, so it is a different machine.

i would guess the yellow toner changed and is preventing the magenta from sticking fully. In addition to transfer voltage, maybe try adjusting fuser temperature? I'm guessing you've swapped drums and still got the same results? I don't know your machine, but does it have a charge roller that's separate and can be replaced?

try printing a green with the same percentages as the orange using cyan in place of magenta? That might not yield answers, but i'd be curious of the result.

 

[Marlonmegaphon]

Thank you very much for the feedback. Yes, it could be that the problem comes from yellow.... You can also see dots in the green, not as much as in the orange, but that may be basically due to the colour. The technician has already worked with the transfer voltage. It helped a little, but not much. And it's not the drum, that's the first thing we tried. But we haven't tried the fusing temperature yet... I'll be happy to test it out. Thanks for the input!

 

[Marlonmegaphon]

In the meantime, we tried a higher fuser temperature - unfortunately it didn't help.