Washed out Blacks

[AlexPetersen]

Recently we have been having a lot of difficulty hitting our dark rich blacks on my Xerox 800. I'm trying to match a sample that we ran last year, but nothing has gotten us close. I have tried various things with the file such as Registration Black, 100% K, 2 different builds of rich black, throwing up the output on curves, overprint, clear coat, different stocks ect ect ect, no luck. Through the rip, tried different color profiles (I calibrate every day) overprint, spot colors, but everything seems to be washed out. We have run this job before, although we do not have the exact file (were it so easy). A Xerox tech came by and we altered the color profiles and tweaked some other settings, with fuser temperature and bias but to no avail. The machine is calibrated like I said and I'm going to try and build a new color profile from the start and see if that has any effect, but honestly I'm not holding out hope.

Has anyone else had experience with this sort of problem before? If you have, what did you have to do to overcome it?

TR;DR Blacks not black enough. At wit's end on how to make them any darker than they are. Ideas?

 

[M@CK]

Are you using the Creo RIP ?
With the creo I had an isue were the "Print grays using black toner" was the culprit.
Also with the Creo, I find that sometime deleting my calibration in the resource center makes a difference.

 

[arossetti]

I have a FF front end and have not had this problem. Our blacks are extremely rich and solid. Have you ran the toner cleaning in the maintenance tab?

 

[Ohkwaritek]

Re: Washed out Blacks

Recently we had to switch paper for what sounds like the same reason. Our blacks were terrible. We were using Explorer gloss and dull but now are running Xerox and Futura laser. Of course, Xerox paper is the most expensive but on it the blacks are perfect. We were told it is the increase in humidity for the time of year. We will try and switch back in a couple of months when the humidity drops to see if that truly is the reason.

You can also try lowering your paper weight for the stock you are running. This helped us get a more solid black on certain papers. We would lower to 106-128, even when the paper was much heavier (though jams were sometimes prohibitive).

Turning on rich black, if you are using the Fiery rip might also help in certain cases.

 

[arossetti]

If you use a lot of coated stock try negotiating with them. We have had contract pricing for the past few years with Xerox supply on our coated stock and are able to get it cheaper then Mohawk, New Page, Sappi etc.

 

[AlexPetersen]

Yeah I love when we get legit Xerox digital paper. We're using euroart gloss stocks and lynx uncoated.

@ohkwaritek, The humidity change would make sense, the humidity control in our plant is crap and here in Stl, it's been hot as hell for months now.

Come monday I think I'm going to take a long hard look at our color profiles and rendering intents and the like. I output a few G7 targets today and it wasn't anywhere close to where I would like it to be. Yellow seems to be out of whack.

@arossetti, I do not know this toner cleaning tab that you speak of. I looked around for it but couldn't find it...? Please tell me more?

It's really frustrating knowing that the machine can achieve what I want, even though it seems to be refusing to at the moment.

 

[arossetti]

Alex: At the IOT login as administration, go to maintenance, click on the maintenance tab, and choose dry ink cleaning. Run a test of the 4 colors and if any of those test sheets show spots like watermarks or any kind of uneven printing run the dry ink cleaning for that color. You may have to run it 2-3 times.