PCQ when printing only

[emujo]

C360, latest firmware, drivers at 3.7 (or latest, can't remember what the exact version was...)

Customer (law office) receives PDF files from the county court house. These are various size 1-50+, searchable PDFs. Intermittently, the MFP will print the docs out with the image area printed with a dark grey (not quite black, you can still read the info on the document) background. This is only on the image area, everything outside the image is correct, the bates stamp on the top of the page is never affected. The images are downloaded from a website, then they open them with a PDF convert program and send them to the printer. I have tried various settings in the print driver, advanced setting, tried using Adobe reader, PS driver, changed the browser they currently use to download the files (Chrome to Firefox) with no help. I believe the issue lies with the sender, something in the OCR process maybe, but I can't figure it out. Copies never exhibit this symptom so I'm ruling out a MFP problem. Sorry no samples to post, but if you think you can help and need the original file, let me know and I will post one. Again, this is intermittent, the same file will print just fine when they notice the poor CQ and re-send the job. TIA EMujo

[EarthKmTech]

For that kind of issue, i would be isolating and capturing the complete print data of the corrupted job and sending it off to km in an escalation to let the Japanese work it out. They will tell you what the problem is and possibly even provide a modified driver. In my experience it takes over 3 months for them to get to it though if you work for a dealer you may experience a hard time getting to that level though.

[blackcat4866]

If you can get a sample PDF doc, you can examine it with ColorPic, and see if there really is background in the original electronic document. As you probably already know, monitors do a truly lousy job of representing CMYK color. Any reflective color will never look exactly like that same refractive color (light reflecting as opposed to light producing).

But with ColorPic you can see the exact RGB or CMYK color requested, then match it up as close as you can on your Pantone color bridge.

I went through this exercise just a few weeks ago. My customer was printing PDF docs, and was expecting it to look like the professionally press printed docs on the shelf. The color requested in the PDF was Pantone 3025. The color of their professionally printed docs was Pantone 3155. The machine could print both colors when I generated a doc with both colors side by side to prove it. All we needed was their doc to request the desired color. Naturally that's not up to us.

The truly funny thing is that their official company Pantone color was something else altogether. =^..^=

[wseyller]

After pulling up a print dialog in adobe reader go to advanced option and check "print as image" and/or "simulate overprint" would likely make the image print as you like. The font might look slightly jagged but not too bad.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

[emujo]

These are black and white docs, MFP sees them as B&W and only increments the B&W counters. Tried the print as image settings but no change, still hit and miss. Anybody know of a program that can give me the details of these PDFs as deep as I want to go? Emujo

[Mr Spock]

Again, this is intermittent, the same file will print just fine when they notice the poor CQ and re-send the job.

Try a different network cable and port. This could be noise on the network line somewhere.

[blackcat4866]

These are black and white docs, MFP sees them as B&W and only increments the B&W counters. ... Emujo

ColorPic can accurately identify many shades of gray, not just color. I stand by my comments. =^..^=

[darry1322]

A couple of possible causes :

1. Maybe a problem with transparent backgrounds. These don't show up on a monitor, but still have data and may be incorrectly reproduced during printing.

2. Compression. If the documents are scanned and the data compressed to save file space, the driver may be having problems with the compression data.
-- we had a customer who scanned docs with high compression to save storage space. These docs looked ok on the monitor and printed ok. When they sent these docs through a fax driver, the entire document had an even grey background. Turning off the compression removed the background.

No idea how to resolve the issue, but one of these may be the cause of the issue.