3051ci colors very inaccurate

[Luther]

You arent alone with this problem, I have a customer with the exact same issue on 2 different machines, 3051ci and an fs-2626, printing blue as gray, the print invoices with a blue header and footer, and the lines on the invoices are black, when they print them on either machine the blue is gray, yet an hp cp2026 printer sitting in the same area prints it perfectly, kyocera has been no help other then asking is the firmware up to date(it is) and asked if we had tried different emulation settings on the 3050ci, which make no difference at all,(and if you can have it print like a konica why not have it do so out of the box) they had replaced and older bizhub c352 which printed the invoice almost exactly they had traded it in and we had to bring it back until the problem is rectified on the kyoceras, which i dont think it will be, we also sell toshiba and the brought a file to the office and it printed perfectly, we are probably going to swap out the kyocera's with toshibas..funny a senior tech who serviced kyocera for 10 years said to the owners, dont sell kyocera color they are awful and we agree,we have more complaints about color reproduction on them then any other box we sell, toshiba, oki, lexmark and hp combined

[MFPTech]

Yep, we sell Kyocera Black only, Konica Color only, anf all line of Canon.

[tmaged]

If you could you forward me any documentation you have specifically on the colour tables it would be much appreciated. The service manual doesn't go into it in any detail.

I was under the impression that if the colour reproduction in the driver was left at printer settings the machine would use Custom Table 1. Is this incorrect?

Here you go.

[jayg30]

Hey guys. Major update on this!

We tried to get the company that leased the machine to come meet with us to discuss and show them the issue. I guess they initially took this as us just being complainers or thought that we just wanted to tell them to take it back. So some words were exchanged, feeling hurt, and so on. I eventually had to deal with this from a more scientific, data driven approach which looks to have gotten us somewhere.

They at first keep trying to blame this on RGB vs CMYK, old software (which isn't true, Office 2010/2013, Illustrator, Photoshop), or just not understanding how to create print quality documents. They recommended that we print color charts so that people could pick the color they wanted, which is crazy IMO since (1) Now I need multiple documents just to print on this Kyocera and (2) I don't want to select the WRONG colors just because the Kyocera can't print the RIGHT color. Furthermore, I did some testing on a 6550 at our other facility and it printed WAY better colors.

However, some good came out of printing the color charts (like a color wheel) it became really clear just how WRONG the Kyocera was. It wasn't just some things wrong, there were multiple problems all over the color ranges. It wasn't even debatable. In summary they were;

1. Colored blocks all showed a discolored (dark or light, depending on color) edge that was very pronounced.
2. All the colors were inaccurate, but some made no sense. Like a single 10% light blue/gray looking block surrounded by very dark blue/green blocks. There seemed to be a block like this in every color.
3. It was basically incapable of creating a gradient/stepping of colors. It would print 3 nearly identical light block and then jump to a really dark block.

After seeing this, I made a detailed email to them explaining just how bad the charts looked. That I could not hand these to even the best graphic artist and have them "match" colors. The colors honestly didn't exist. I'll get some pictures to show just how bad this was, but believe me when I say it was horrible and far worse then I had expected. I told them I thought something either physical or in firmware was wrong with this machine because this couldn't be normal.

They finally stepped up and had someone from Kyocera come to look at the machine. I wanted to watch what he did, but I was busy and didn't even get to ask his name. He works for Kyocera and is located in Central NJ, so whoever you are THANK YOU!

Within I would say 30 minutes he brought me some printouts of the color chart and AMAZINGLY, THEY LOOKED SO MUCH BETTER!

1. Edge Discoloration was pretty much gone
2. Colors weren't exactly like the Konica, but MUCH closer. No more color blocks that just looked completely out of place!
3. Actually was printing the colors in a gradient/stepping!

So what the heck did he do? Well he said he just did a calibration! SERIOUSLY!?!? The tech from the leasing company, who was there with this Kyocera guy, had done a calibration on the machine just last week just to make sure. They did the same calibration before they sent us the machine at their facility.

So all I can conclude from this is that the Kyocera guy did something different when calibrating the machine that the tech did not. I plan to ask the tech next time I talk to him to see if I can find out what he did different. Hopefully he paid good attention to him and learned something new.

I did some color chart tests afterwards, and I still have far more to test, but it is SO MUCH BETTER. Not perfect, but close enough. Now the difference between it and the Konica looks like saturation (Kyocera still looks "flat"), some discoloration particularly in the grey range, and overall the color isn't as clear/solid as the Konica.


Also, I found out in this testing that it seems that "gdi compatible mode" can cause text to look "bold". If you print as B&W it doesn't matter. But if you have text in a Color print it does. It could have also been PCL XL causing the issue (I changed it to KPDL) and I have to test it a bit more, but I think it is gdi. I ended up using KPDL and setting the "font settings" to "allow native download" because I thought it looked best.

[blackcat4866]

To address the text looking "bold", in the print driver you can try placing a check in the box "print text as black". In full color, it takes a large amount of C/M/Y/K toner to create black, giving an embossed effect.

I'm glad that you got the right guy to look at your machine. I suggest that you get a point by point procedure to follow to maintain the color calibration. If a specific color match is that important to you, you'll want to do calibrations yourself. I would be interested in comparing what I do to this list. =^..^=

[justanotherhack]

Something I didn't see anyone else mention is the color conversion. After setting the driver to KPDL, you can then go into preferences, Imaging tab, and under Color conversion, select Quality Priority. Note that some pages, especially with photos in them, will print a bit slower, but the colors come out much better so long as you are printing from a pdf or similar document. This won't help powerpoint or word, unfortunately, but if someone is being a pain, I show them how to convert their document to a pdf, then print it with these settings.

[jmaister]

coloured blocks?


adobe setting then? sometimes you get pixelated printout when the image info isnt sent in full, or printer profile is set other than default. Sometimes when using profiles other than default or custom(2nd colour table), the prints look blockish or looks to be in objects format(MS publisher/word).

one way to ROUGHLY check if your printer's gradient is accurate is to print a counter status page, if the colour bar isnt gradient but rather in 3 colour blocks, it needs gray adjustment(toner curve).


tl:dr

while calibration is important, Adobe setting is even more so. WE LOVE ADOBE(across all brands)