MPC-5503 Copy Quality Great- Print Quality SUCKS

[capted99]

My customer has Ricoh MP C5503 in a small quick print shop. Color Copies look good, but .pdf files with photo's in them do not look as good as the originals. Given that they are 1st generation "prints" and not copies, they should look as good as the scanned digital file, but they are kind of washed out. However, if you place photo or magazine image on the platen glass, the copies look pretty good.

The customer is using the latest Ricoh Windows 10 print drivers, but seeing as how this machine was sold as a "lease-returned" machine, it may not have the latest firmware. What may be causing the photo-realism of the prints to be less than it should be, and what possible solutions might you suggest?

[slimslob]

First make sure the optics are all clean as Auto Color Calibration running correctly depends on clean optics.

Run Auto Color Calibration for copying and all printing Resolutions. At one time Ricoh recommended doing this after every firmware update.

[FrohnB]

+1 on this. We have one at a church that will start printing "off-colored" or "blurry", and usually running the ACC brings it back to normal. Have had cases where we needed to Clear Memory for the Printer application first, and then run ACC.


EDIT: Make sure the print driver is a PCL6 driver. Not PCL6 V4.13./ Not PCL6 V4/ Not PCL6 universal. Have had issues with those drivers printing in all sorts of weird ways (missing images/ images printed as black box/ extra characters/ missing pages/ etc.).