duplex color on one side & black on the reverse

[copymutt]

Greetings,

Placed our first Ricoh C3502 last week at a church. They run a weekly newsletter, 2 sides letter format.

With their old Lanier they could print the front side in color & the back in black print in one operation from their computer.

They are utilizing PCL-6 as the driver on XP operating system with Word as the application software. We don't see any options within the driver settings to achieve this. The back side does print in black but it is composite of colors & racks up as a color print, thus expensive.

Anybody been down this road B4. Hope this is not requiring a Fiery controller.
Thanks in advance.

Copymutt

[copymutt]

Re: duplex color on one side & black on the reverse

Ricoh answered our FAQ & said this is not possible, yet the church did this for five years on their older
lanier LD435C (Ricoh C3535). Does this help anyone to offer up a clue?

[leo34staffs]

Maybe they used rpcs driver which has the ability to use auto colour detect on the print driver. (ACS). RPCS is not available on some newer kit.

[copymutt]

Re: duplex color on one side & black on the reverse

The Lanier ran PCL-6., but I think I've got it figured out based on some new info. First Ricoh is wrong, you can do a duplexed combination of color one side & black on the other & the machine will rack up counts correctly. All that was required to make it work was to remove a photo from the black side. Have not determined the source of the photo yet. I wager the photo is not a true black/white photo but a black composite of primary colors. Since this is all binary the driver sees it as color and sends the copier a color image. When was the last time you saw a digital black & white camera.

Copymutt

[Ramón]

Re: duplex color on one side & black on the reverse

I think a solution that can give your client is that the page is only in black black, with no character or color point and if you have photos or drawings grayscale them, that way even in the driver color selections and duplex printing, leave a page in black and white and one in color. Then you can check on the counter.
Remember, at the time that a page has some color and how small print in color.

[copymutt]

Re: duplex color on one side & black on the reverse

Thanks Ramon,

She's already grey scaled the photo, but it still racks up as color. I've suggested blowing up the photo 400% & printing it. If color pixels can be seen w/ a loupe the problem is still the photo & not driver or machine. As the black side does rack up as black w/o the photo it is for sure the cause.

Copymutt

[qbert69]

Re: duplex color on one side & black on the reverse

If the machine has a document server, you can send one side (color) to the doc server as a single page, for the second side, sent it as B&W to the doc server. Once there, you can choose the single sided documents and duplex them onto one page. The icons next to the document preview will show if it is in color or B&W (set in the initial send from the print driver). This is great especially for church bulletins since alot of times, the outside will be color with very little or no information change--church photo, church contact info, etc.... In this case, the outside color can "permanently" reside on the document server to be used with the new updated B&W internal info.

Hope this helps!

[copymutt]

Re: duplex color on one side & black on the reverse

Brilliant! Didn't think of that. Identifies the fault & works around the issue all at the same time.

Thanks qbert.


Copymutt

[teebee1234]

Re: duplex color on one side & black on the reverse

In most drivers there is a setting to "print grayscale as black" or words to that effect. Check in the Quality settings of preferences.

[sandmanmac]

Re: duplex color on one side & black on the reverse

There's already some excellent ideas here, but might as well throw in my 2 cents....have you tried using the old Lanier /Ricoh driver?

[copymutt]

Re: duplex color on one side & black on the reverse

Thanks for all the ideas. We had to delete the old Lanier driver to get the new driver to work. Customer had already coverted the photo to greyscale but it still racked up as color. The big difference here is this was the first time she ever included a photo on the black side. W'll try to experiment w/ the doc server intermediate method today.

Copymutt