Xerox Altalink C8000 Color Accuracy Issues

[ClintonClarke]

We too, are having some issues with the 8030 we just leased. Can't get Pantones to match close at all from Adobe Creative Suite. :-(

[Gerald]

Our AltaLink C8055 has a weird tendency to shift greyscale pictures into green/yellow when using postscript (Global Print Driver). The result is pretty extreme, it's not just a light tint. I've tried literally every single option that could influence color in the postscript driver and the result while sometimes better was never great.

The best color accuracy I was able to achieve was with the PCL6 driver instead of the Postscript driver, but ONLY with Print Quality = High Resolution in the PCL6 driver. With Print Quality = Standard greyscale becomes green/yellowish again. It's pretty disappoiting for such a big and seemlingly professional printer, but I can live with the results of the PCL driver and will just replace the printer driver on all PCs and set resolution to high.

Stuff I've tried besides tons of driver settings which all had no effect:
- fresh windows installation of an oder windows version (v1903)
- both older and newest Xerox Global Print Driver
- updating the C8055 to the latest firmware
- completely resetting the C8055 to factory defaults
- various calibration options that can be done in the menu on the xerox device

Printing a JPG via USB-Stick directly on the Printer with the USB-Print-Application came out really well, even better than PCL with Resolution High, but that might have been a randomly good result for this very specific picture.

In the end, I can live with the PCL, Resolution High results and I've compared the results to a printout of the same picture on a modern similar Sharp printer and both were off somewhat. I guess accurate color reproduction is not really a focus for those office machines? Not really sure why Postscript made things so much worse though.

Oh, and by the way, the Xerox WorkCentre 7845 which we had before does not have this extreme green/yellow tint problem with exactly the same Postscript driver settings. My test picture is here by the way.

[uamarketing]

Any updates on this? I am using MacOS Big Sur and the AltaLink C8145 with the only driver available 5.7.2 for Mac OS and the colors are EXTREMELY dark printing a file from Adobe InDesign. I printed the same file to our previous machine the WorkCentre 7845 and the colors look MUCH closer to the intended results.

[Joe Arseneau]

This begets these points

1) one of the strengths of using Postscript is to get consistent color/detail/gradation/page appearance across different printer models and even different brands Correct

2) enabling that setting essentially negates the color part of the postscript advantage globally for Adobe Reader DC  Postscript jobs, in this case PDF, can have the color profile embedded in them, if it doesn't, it expects RGB output (red is magenta, blue is purple etc etc) It is always better to let the printer determine color, it doesn't matter what brand of printer

3) Does having that setting enabled have any meaning when you are printing to a PCL 6 driver? Considering this post Re: General best practices-- PCL vs Postscript, Bidirectional communication It does not say explicitly that PCL6 handles the color selection, but does it? Is that why our layout looked right when printing to the PCL6 driver but not the PS one with the check box unchecked in both cases? PCL just can't do accuracy in color because it simply doesn't embed color like PS does. I would always leave it checked (enabled) but PCL really isn't going to change much (if at all) PCL is much more accurate though, if you are printing CAD files, you want PCL (PS will do antialiasing and smooth jagged lines, this may make the building fall over ;-) )

4) since the setting is global for all print queues Adobe Acrobat Reader prints to, should I enable that checkbox if people will be using other printers with a mix of PCL6 and PS? Yes, always have it enabled, no matter the driver, the printer, the brand, or the type (CMYK toner/Solid Ink/liquid Ink), Doubly so in printers that contain more than CMYK toner/ink.

[PartTimeGeek]

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@Joe Arseneau wrote:

I assume you are referencing the Xerox Global Print driver (GPD) and not the HP Universal Print Driver (UPD)

blue becomes purple, red becomes magenta, and people printed all get a sunburn, is typically because the app by default outputs RGB, Adobe products do this for each printer until you change it (for each one) via Let printer determine color

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I just checked that on my Adobe Acrobat Reader DC:
What I found is that the setting is global within Adobe Reader DC for all printers, whether PCL or PS

Setting on PS printer

Unrelated HP printer

HP PCL6 printer same settingUncheck the setting on HP printer and hit OKBack to Xerox PS printer- Picked up change - It's Global

This begets these points

1) one of the strengths of using Postscript is to get consistent color/detail/gradation/page appearance across different printer models and even different brands

2) enabling that setting essentially negates the color part of the postscript advantage globally for Adobe Reader DC

3) Does having that setting enabled have any meaning when you are printing to a PCL 6 driver? Considering this post Re: General best practices-- PCL vs Postscript, Bidirectional communication It does not say explicitly that PCL6 handles the color selection, but does it? Is that why our layout looked right when printing to the PCL6 driver but not the PS one with the check box unchecked in both cases?

4) since the setting is global for all print queues Adobe Acrobat Reader prints to, should I enable that checkbox if people will be using other printers with a mix of PCL6 and PS?

[PartTimeGeek]

Yes Joe :) My mind is like a sieve sometimes.

I edited my post to correct my cross branding :)

What is interesting is that those options were all enabled when we were using the ColorQube and we didn't seem to have any issues.

Relating to the Adobe Reader DC settings, I don't like having to do something like that because it is a setting I or a successor or a substitue needs to remember to change any time they deploy a new PC or re-factory image one, or create a new user profile for someone. I will look to see if there is some kind of Group Policy registry hack to do it globally, but I am not sure I like that idea either.

Regarding the settings you pointed out in the GPD driver, As long as I can easily deploy those settings globally using either the Printer Properties | Adnvanced | Printing Defaults settings at the priint queue on the print server, or with the Xerox Driver XML Config Tool (which I have already in place) I will make those changes and do some testing.

Thanks for your quick and easy to understand replies!

Chris.

[Joe Arseneau]

I assume you are referencing the Xerox Global Print driver (GPD) and not the HP Universal Print Driver (UPD)

blue becomes purple, red becomes magenta, and people printed all get a sunburn, is typically because the app by default outputs RGB, Adobe products do this for each printer until you change it (for each one) via Let printer determine color

Speed tends to be a too many check boxes are enabled by default thing, so try disabling these 3 things (You won't lose a single feature by doing so)

Color is definitely still being worked on though.

[Joe Arseneau]

I assume you are referencing the Xerox Global Print driver (GPD) and not the HP Universal Print Driver (UPD)

blue becomes purple, red becomes magenta, and people printed all get a sunburn, is typically because the app by default outputs RGB, Adobe products do this for each printer until you change it (for each one) via Let printer determine color

Speed tends to be a too many check boxes are enabled by default thing, so try disabling these 3 things (You won't lose a single feature by doing so)

Color is definitely still being worked on though.

[PartTimeGeek]

We had Richie from Xerox Support NY out today to install the latest SPAR (100.002.068.26100) for our AltaLink C8055 to address an issue where (for one use case anyway) printouts of previously scanned documents, saved in PDF form, came out with black text badly washed out, whereas printing the same PDF through the same GPD PS driver to our VersaLink B405 had a well saturated black level commensurate with what you see on the screen in Adobe Reader DC.

We did some further testing with the GPD PS and GPD PCL6 drivers after the SPAR went in.

The SPAR presumably fixed PCL6 color printing issues as that was an improvement listed in the release notes (we wouldnt have known as we never used that driver for color brochures etc) and our quarterly newsletter (with a complex graphics / photograph / text / pie chart layout) looked great and as reasonably close to what one sees on a monitor without color calibration as one could hope for.

What we found out however is that the GPD PS driver (ours was the most current as of this posting: version 5.617.7.0N - 2018.05.30) had SERIOUS issues with Color representation. Blues became purple, etc.

We also noticed that VersaLink B405, print speed was 1 page every 10 seconds or so With the GPD PS driver.

We tried the device specific AltaLink C8055 PS device driver to see if it was a UPD issue, but the output looked exactly the same.. Horrible color rendition. I am wondering whether there is a SPAR being worked on currently for the AltaLink C8000 series to address PostScript color issues?

After years with a lemon of a ColorQube 9303, I had conditioned myself to using the PS driver because it was much more stable and consistent (the PCL6 driver for the 9303 used to print out the banner across two 8.5x11 pages whenever you printed 11x17 print jobs, for one quirky example) but it looks like either the AltaLink's internal PostScript processor is out of whack or both the GPD and device specific PostScript drivers have issues.

Since the VersaLink crawls with the GPD PS driver, I suspect it is a little of both.