SID for toner?

[Slammer]

“You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish you had."

With a little bit of ad-lib you could take this quote and say something like, oh I dunno:
"You go to customers with the tools you have, not the tools you might want or wish you had"
Recently I was at a customer who was complaining that the print run from his digital press was inconsistent.
I had a look, there was quite a bit of difference between the first print and the last print, also across the page. ∆E was off the chart;-)
The error seems to be with the machine, but how to prove it to the machines support hotline so at customers and on the fly.
I fired up the old gretag and set it to measure solid ink density, it did the trick and gave me a reading that I could use to prove it to the "our-machines-are-infallible" guys.
However the guys on the hotline had never heard of this method that seemed (at least to me) the logical thing to do.
I have done a bit of research on ballpark densities for solid ink or toner or pixiedust or whatever other gloop that gets used by digital printers and have drawn a blank, much to my surprise as I would have thought there would be something comparable to SID´s for offset.

 

[arossetti]

What vendor? I know Xerox has a tolerance for color difference on sheet based on the class of printer you have.

I think entry level production color, v2100/1000i, is around 6 deltaE.

On a different note it is at that point with the hotline I just tell them stop talking and send a tech.

 

[Deleted member 16349]

I have done a bit of research on ballpark densities for solid ink or toner or pixiedust or whatever other gloop that gets used by digital printers and have drawn a blank, much to my surprise as I would have thought there would be something comparable to SID´s for offset.

Measuring densities on offset relates to the applied ink film to the plate and eventually to the substrate. There is a physical connection. But with digital printing, there is no physical connection to any solid or screen value since the relationships are all digital. That means they could be anything that the initial programmer decided. So a density measurement of a solid in a digital print could have no relationship any screened areas etc.

Although for your problem, measuring density variation of solids does seem to be a good test because it shows that the machine in not repeatable for some reason.

Also density is a relative value. It is not an absolute value and the value will be different for different ink systems and paper etc. It is not a colour value. Very useful but not colour accurate.