A few weeks back we had our Wide Format guy put in his his 2 week notice. When his 2 weeks were up we had yet to hire a replacement. Around the same time our Warehouse guy was on vacation. Both of which were jobs I previously held. It was a busy couple of weeks for me.
After filling in for the warehouse guy for a week (while also doing my actual maintenance job), I wandered down to the Wide Format area to see how the area Supervisor was doing filling in. He started telling me about the jobs in the rack, which at first I immediate thought “I don’t care” until I realized he was telling me because he was off the following week and I would have to fill in.
Ok, filling in isn’t bad, I don’t mind that department. However there was a big job that needed to get done that week. The customer is pretty particular on color. Proofs have been sent out and color approved by the customer. The media was specially cut out for this job. And the original due date was 2 weeks before I walk in on this, though to be fair I believe the lateness from from the customer. Then I’m hit with an “Oh by the way”. The black is printing brown. The color proofs were printed on the FB750, and the FB500 just doesn’t QUITE look the same. The inks are a little different, and our FB750 has the Light Cyan and Light Magenta, which print automatically as our standard.
Way back when we only had the FB500, before I got into the department, the Supervisors and Art Department got together and figured out a black that would look good on the printer. If you print something at 100% black, it’s pretty blah. It’s black but it’s not BLACK, ya know? So they came up with Rich Black, CMYK 20, 20, 20, 100. For non-printers thats 20% Cyan, 20% Magenta, 20% Yellow, and 100% Black. Or maybe it’s industry standard. I don’t know, But I think they tend to change it when files come in. Also it’s noticeable when they forget to change a letter.
This was not an issue of the rich black printing black. This was rich black printing chocolate brown. Before I came down, the supervisor had changed the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow ink boxes, they were low, but not out (unlike that god damned White on the FB500 that lies to you all the time). No change in print color. I was left with “well it’s up to you now, I’m out of here”.
Looking through the loupe, to me, it looked like the black wasn’t printing. I changed out the black box. Emptied the reservoir a couple times, no change.
I call up HP, they said that it takes 3 times to empty the lines and get new ink to the reservoir. They also asked for information about the printer. It just so happened that I had just changed a black and a cyan print head in the FB750 and was worried that maybe something screwed up. However, I found that to be unlikely since in the test printed all of the jets, in all of the colors, were printing their lines.
So I emptied the black reservoir for the 3rd time, no change. I cleaned the print heads. No change. Re-ran all the calibrations. No change. I left for the night.
Saturday I went in for an hour or so. I had a friend make me a couple files, a black rectangle in each file, but one being 100% black and the other our rich black. To rule out something with our art department. They both printed brown on the FB750. I sent them to the FB500 and they printed correctly. That tells me that it’s probably not Caldera, our RIP program, right? I mean, the same program send the files to the separate printers, if it was that it should affect both. Also, files IN the FB750 from before (and presumable printing correctly before) were not printing correctly. I left for the day.
I went in for a bit Sunday and printed a file I had on my SD card. It was a picture of the moon in the night sky and it was a JPG. Our normal files are PDF. Out of curiosity I printed it and it looked pretty good. not as brown as everything else. I thought I was on to something. Maybe the printer was not printing PDF files correctly and printing everything else correctly.
Monday I had art department guy make some files. He made a Vector CMYK bar pattern, a PDF raster, and a TIFF Raster. Both Rasters were Brown, and the Vector looked pretty good. We spent about 3 hours changing settings in Caldera trying to get it to print. Mind you, we never change these settings. One setting was something about keeping the color correct for Vectors, which is what it’s always set on. If we changed it to images it made the TIFF and PDF rasters better but the vector was then off. If we set it for both vectors and images neither were back to where they were, but were better than what they had been.
Out of ideas, I get a hold of the guy that originally trained us on these machines Tuesday morning. He’s convinced it’s probably not something mechanical with the machine, but more with Caldera. I said that didn’t seem to be the case, since I can send files from the same program to both the FB500 and FB750 and they print differently. And the setting between the 2 are the same.
After verifying settings between the 2 and his own set up, we found no issues. He sent a test file. It printed fine on the FB500 and had color issues on the FB750, obviously. He thought it could be a corrupt profile. I reinstalled profiles/drivers with no change. His idea was then to temporarily turn off color management, which would for the printer to print the solid colors by the stated percentages… or something. I did was he said and solid black on the print was black. Holy shit. I mean everything else was way off. But black was black.
After staring at these prints for a gold amount of time, we started to realize that the Cyan looked like Light Cyan. We had just changed the ink box. I had a crazy theory… What if the Cyan ink box had Light Cyan by mistake!? The Ink was changed because the black was printing brown, but if there was a corrupt profile, he changed the ink, then the ink was wrong, and then we fixed the profile, but it’s still printing wrong because of the ink! Flawless!
It made sense to the other guy, who suggested I call HP for a warranty claim, and since if it happened to me it would have to affect many more. I call and wait for a return call from a tech.
In the mean time he had me check the ink from the box as a drop on white cloth. The Cyans between the FB750 and FB500 matched and were clearly different than the Light Cyan. There goes my theory.
HP calls and I tell him about my ink. He says oh, they’ve been having issues with Cyan, where it’s prematurely separating. So the ink in the lines is from the old box, which probably prematurely separated. The new ink probably hasn’t reached the reservoir yet. Do 3 reservoir empty/refill routines and it should fix it.
And it did.
It took 5 days, multiple people, many print tests, and all it was was the cyan ink prematurely separated.
But, if I sent over 100% Black files, why did THEY print brown too!? Because Caldera’s Color Management system, when on, pays no attention to your set percentages and does what it wants.
Lesson Learned.
