MPC4502 Processed Black vs Black on Printing Pages, not copy

[mrfuser]

I have a client with an MPC4502 that prints a newsletter. Some pages are color and some are black and white. I can't see any way to tell the machine to print, (and meter log), the black pages as black and the color as color. They are using a MAC of course.

Any ideas out there?

Thanks!

K

[Counsel]

Re: MPC4502 Processed Black vs Black on Printing Pages, not copy

Its never come up with any of my customers but if you send a job from the driver with color selected they all count as color pages, without sending the black only pages as a separate print job I don't know that you can unless there is some special software that can do that. But like i said i have never had it come up so maybe there is and I just never needed to know it.

[blackcat4866]

Re: MPC4502 Processed Black vs Black on Printing Pages, not copy

I've fought this battle on a Sharp. My enduser was creating documents in Microsoft Publisher. The Sharp driver theoretically can print black only images with black toner, and color images with color toner within a single multipage document. There were a lot of problems to solve. I'll list just a few:

If there is a single pixel of color on the page it's a color image. Even when black (0/0/0/100) is selected, Microsoft Publisher inserts a small percentage of magenta (0/3/0/100) which can be detected by ColorPic. Also, JPEG images that say they are black, when imported into Publisher have small amounts of color, again detectable by ColorPic. The only hope of composing whole pages without a single pixel of color is through Adobe Professional, or some other professional composition application.

In the end, it's not about the MFP, it's about the meticulous construction of the electronic image so that there is not a single pixel of color, and selecting the Auto Color function in the driver. Your average church secretary is going to have a difficult time getting there. ColorPic is a very valuable tool in tracking down those annoying little color pixel escapees.

My Sharp rep was able to provide some sample Adobe documents that incremented the counters properly, so I know it's possible, just not easy. =^..^=

[slimslob]

Re: MPC4502 Processed Black vs Black on Printing Pages, not copy

Most if not all Ricoh MFPs using Ricoh's PCL6 or PCL5c driver will print black and white pages with the driver set for color. In a mixed B/W and color job, if any page has 1 color pixel, it will count the entire page as color. If there are no color pixels on the page, the page will count as B/W.

[mrfuser]

Re: MPC4502 Processed Black vs Black on Printing Pages, not copy

Ok, but remember we are printing with a Mac that only uses PS driver.

[Tonerbomb]

Re: MPC4502 Processed Black vs Black on Printing Pages, not copy

there should be a setting for printing black and grey scale as true black in the driver as well as the native app the file is created in.......

on older machines it was a print black with over print............ that simply put a layer of black over the cmyk black..........

[KenB]

Re: MPC4502 Processed Black vs Black on Printing Pages, not copy

This can open a very nasty can of worms, as there are so many factors that come into play.

Even if you can get the black pages to truly be "K" only, if there are color and b/w pages laid out ( such as in a newsletter) in booklet mode (duplex and 2 up), both pages on the same side of the sheet will count as color. That's because the developing units simply can't change positions in the middle of a page.

As far as getting all the color out of a page, Acrobat Pro may do it on its own, but we have always used PitStop Pro, which is a plug-in for Acrobat Pro (NOT Reader).

A word of caution, though...it's an expensive proposition. From what I remember, PitStop Pro actually cost more than Acrobat Pro. And, yes, you would need both.

The customer would really need to print a ton of bulletins every month to make it worth the investment.