Variable Click Charges, Color Profiles, and Service Contracts

[wcdigital]

We recently upgraded one of our owned units to a click based service contract. This is one of our first units to be running around the clock in terms of digital printing and I am trying to get the best information on click charges.

Before the service contract I have never had issues with some level of estimating toner consumption on the unit due to the ease of using the color controls in Fiery Workstation - especially in maintaining Pure Black on mixed color documents for example.

However, I have recently realized that no matter what I set my color profile to, entire jobs will be counted as color clicks.

This is unfortunate because it doesn't make sense cost wise. For example I have a 600 page textbook that I would estimate only has 20% of the pages with color illustrations. The rest is pure black text or lines in between.

Another example is a 133 workbook I have been printing that only has 10 or 12 color pages.

Ricoh Support and Ricoh Customer Service has notified me that printers can not differentiate jobs regardless of software. I am still awaiting callbacks from a production tech but they said that might take a week. I don't believe they are acting with full knowledge in this scenario.

That stops this unit dead in its tracks for printing and its suppose to be my workhorse this season.

I would love more information or reading on this issue. I also don't believe the first wave of information from Ricoh was correct. Especially the recommendation that I manually slip in color pages into textbooks.

I have heard that Fiery Impose and/or Fiery JobMaster are able to specify page by page whether it is a color or black and white click on the printer. Can anyone verify this information or provide further reading? I would hate to purchase a Fiery Application that does not actually achieve any difference in amending this click rate differentiation.


Thank Y'all!

Ricoh Pro C5200S (w/Postscript3)
Fiery Color Controller E44B v1.0 Print Server
iMac OSX 11.4 Workstations

 

[AP90]

Im not familiar with Ricoh, but it sounds like someone doesn't know what they're talking about on Ricoh's end about the machine not being able to differentiate between jobs. Thats a load of crap. We run mixed color and b&w on our Versant 3100 all the time and never have an issue. Actually just ran a book with the exact same specs. 200 pages, 90 color, 110 b&w. One thing we do on a lot of the files we from brokers and "designers" is to run them through the B&W profile on acrobat and convert everything. I find a lot of people have hidden artifacts that will cause a color click vs b&w. And on most jobs I will run 1 copy then go to my job logs in the fiery and see exactly how the machine is running it. If the clicks dont match up, ill either get back in acrobat or fiery impose and convert to grayscale. But I've had tons of files come though that are "b&w" but in reality they show up as color because someone had a hidden artifact or better yet, they used rich black for text or something stupid like that.

 

[Stickman42]

Most of our print has crop/cut/registration marks. The Fiery on our Versant will count a black only page as color unless we convert the marks to a non-CMYK color. These marks which appear to be black only are actually "registration" color in Adobe's realm.

 

[wcdigital]

Im not familiar with Ricoh, but it sounds like someone doesn't know what they're talking about on Ricoh's end about the machine not being able to differentiate between jobs. Thats a load of crap. We run mixed color and b&w on our Versant 3100 all the time and never have an issue. Actually just ran a book with the exact same specs. 200 pages, 90 color, 110 b&w. One thing we do on a lot of the files we from brokers and "designers" is to run them through the B&W profile on acrobat and convert everything. I find a lot of people have hidden artifacts that will cause a color click vs b&w. And on most jobs I will run 1 copy then go to my job logs in the fiery and see exactly how the machine is running it. If the clicks dont match up, ill either get back in acrobat or fiery impose and convert to grayscale. But I've had tons of files come though that are "b&w" but in reality they show up as color because someone had a hidden artifact or better yet, they used rich black for text or something stupid like that.

I appreciate the input. It sounds like Fiery Impose might be a useful tool to add to the workflow then. I have been using imposition plug-ins to Adobe but will likely move towards Fiery if it helps add another solution to differentiation.

 

[ColorMonkey]

I'm assuming in CWS under color settings you know about CMYK/RGB print black only settings and how that works correct? I or someone can help you with that however I don't want to make a long post covering stuff you may already be familiar with. It sounds like this may be one of the issues your having but honestly it could be a few other things as well.

 

[Ynot_UK]

Ricoh Support and Ricoh Customer Service has notified me that printers can not differentiate jobs regardless of software.

More BS from people who should be flipping burgers to earn their coin. Don't accept this nonsense!

Provided the pages really are BW pages, you should be able to watch the counter accumulate colour, BW and total clicks as the jobs run.

 

[[email protected]]

As Ynot_UK indicates, as long as a page is truly 100% K then that's how it should click, regardless of the color of the other pages. If you have Enfocus Pitstop (usually included when licensing Fiery Impose) then you can use the Inspector tool to see if there are any color elements on a given page, or use their Pre-Flight tool to give you a count of them. Job Master does do what you're asking and you can try it for 30 days on a trial basis before deciding to buy it. Just right-click on a job in the Held queue, select Job Master and then confirm the trial. About five years ago there was a "bug" in Adobe CS software that when you added trim or other marks to a page although it appeared to be black they were actually process black, so even if the whole page was K-only it would still click as a color page. Maybe there's something similar going on with your files? I always tell my customers that although you may think the whole page is 100%K if there's even a single color pixel it'll click as color.

Assuming you're talking about Ricoh-direct support (vs. dealer support) I find it difficult to believe that it takes a week to get a Ricoh production tech to respond but if that's actually the case then message me and I'll see if I can help you to get support. If he/she doesn't know the answer then they can escalate to our internal support center and ultimately to EFI if necessary but I think the answer is going to be a simple one. Worst case they can test your file on another unit and figure it out from there.

 

[ColorMonkey]

I remember a while back asking EFI if there was a way to process a job and have it feed back the number of pages that would click color and click b/w. Of course this would be based off of the particular properties that will be applied to the job. This I know would help so many however all I got was a "hey good idea" and "no plans but we'll look in to it". That was a couple years ago but I still think it would be a great function to add to CWS. This would actually tell you the click counts and allow you to change settings if needed or missed.

 

[chriscozi]

I remember a while back asking EFI if there was a way to process a job and have it feed back the number of pages that would click color and click b/w. Of course this would be based off of the particular properties that will be applied to the job. This I know would help so many however all I got was a "hey good idea" and "no plans but we'll look in to it". That was a couple years ago but I still think it would be a great function to add to CWS. This would actually tell you the click counts and allow you to change settings if needed or missed.

But, but, then the machine vendors wouldn't be able to innocuously charge for those inconsequential cmyk artifacts or registration colors and ignore the questions from customers.
Snark intended.
Do not forget EFI is paid by the machine vendors first and foremost.
Yes we pay to 'use' the software but the vendors pay to have it resident.
Follow the money . . .

 

[wcdigital]

As Ynot_UK indicates, as long as a page is truly 100% K then that's how it should click, regardless of the color of the other pages. If you have Enfocus Pitstop (usually included when licensing Fiery Impose) then you can use the Inspector tool to see if there are any color elements on a given page, or use their Pre-Flight tool to give you a count of them. Job Master does do what you're asking and you can try it for 30 days on a trial basis before deciding to buy it. Just right-click on a job in the Held queue, select Job Master and then confirm the trial. About five years ago there was a "bug" in Adobe CS software that when you added trim or other marks to a page although it appeared to be black they were actually process black, so even if the whole page was K-only it would still click as a color page. Maybe there's something similar going on with your files? I always tell my customers that although you may think the whole page is 100%K if there's even a single color pixel it'll click as color.

Assuming you're talking about Ricoh-direct support (vs. dealer support) I find it difficult to believe that it takes a week to get a Ricoh production tech to respond but if that's actually the case then message me and I'll see if I can help you to get support. If he/she doesn't know the answer then they can escalate to our internal support center and ultimately to EFI if necessary but I think the answer is going to be a simple one. Worst case they can test your file on another unit and figure it out from there.

Reviewing the files in question with PitStop had revealed 1-2% cyan with the black illustrations and in some of the black lines. That would solve why even with Pure-Black settings in my Fiery color profile the machine was clicking color on these files.

 

[DYP]

One thing to try is set your document Color Mode to grayscale and then go to the Media tab and set your color pages as Mixed Media and choose CMYK in Color Mode.

 

[Mike Z]

We've always had to manually set the color pages in the Media tab of the Fiery rip because Preps marks are registration color and will generate a color click charge on grayscale pages otherwise. Since the marks color is a global setting in Preps, if you set them to Grayscale there your spot color or CMYK jobs for offset presses would have no marks. The only option is to use Pitstop ahead of time or set the color mode in the Fiery.

 

[imxtoeknee]

Heres a screenshot of the settings in Fiery Impose. If you run a lot of files with mixed color/black and white pages then I do think it is worth getting. You don't have to do as much file prepping and can just drop into Command Workstation and select whichever pages you want as grayscale.

 

[Stickman42]

Our application is most often books with several hundred pages, with mixed color and B/W. We print with crop marks that are registration color (CMYK). My prep guy uses pitstop global change to make the marks 100% K, no CMY. The pages of black type only are already usually set to 100% K, 0% CMY. This by itself gets the printer to recognize black only and color pages correctly.

 

[bill kahny]

Heres a screenshot of the settings in Fiery Impose. If you run a lot of files with mixed color/black and white pages then I do think it is worth getting. You don't have to do as much file prepping and can just drop into Command Workstation and select whichever pages you want as grayscale.

Great tip never noticed that before! We control files we set and prep too, as Stickman42, but for customer supplied files in a rush, I love knowing that is there.