Printing Grey on Roland SP540

[Hugh Potter]

I don’t know if this will help you but greens and greens can both be issues on cmyk, I printed off a large cmyk chart and put it on the wall so A, you know exactly what colour your printer will print and can show the ccustomer / they can choose, and B, you can pick a colour that your printer does print well..

Using latex and genuine hp inks I can’t comment on your inks / machine but having that chart on the wall takes out a lot of guesswork when designing in cmyk!

[Kevin Mahoney]

I’ve struggled with this for years on all my versacamms, never really cracked it as there’s never the time available with getting jobs out. My engineer mentioned something about using ‘density control only’ in the profile tab in versaworks, but I’ve never really been impressed by the results. Have a look on the Roland website, there seems to be a method or two that I haven’t tried. I bought the pro 3 & pro 4 a couple of years back & with the light black ink, greys are much more accurate. Still can’t bring myself to retire the versacamms, slow as hell compared to the pros but I still get a big kick watching them all running at the same time

[Jonathan feeney]

I had this problem also but changed my black to the black in the RGB palette and it prints perfect every time now cheers

[Stafford Cox]

Most RIP’s will try and produce a gray using CMY & K channels still. I find the best way to get a pure grayscale varies from RIP to RIP. I’m not sure how to do it in Versaworks but essentially you need to disable the ICC profiles entirely. It will probably overink and other colours won’t be corrected so we’ll but for that B&W photo you’re trying to output, it should do the job. Shiraz for example has Mono print as an option. Rasterlink (and Onyx I believe) have Spot colour replacement which can do a similar thing. Maybe Versaworks Dual will have more control?

[Duncan Wilkie]

Do you have LT Magenta and LT Cyan cartridges in your set up?

[Duncan Wilkie]

We had a defective print head. Instead of getting grey in the halftone we were getting a pinkish colour. It turns out it wasn’t printing the LT. cyan properly. LT Cyan and LT Magenta surprisingly are used to print the half tone greys. The spot greys were printing fine. Apparently this is a common issue with that print head.
Strangely, it didn’t happen all the time.

[Jamie Hunt]

Hi all sorry I should of said i only have 4 colours CMYK no light Magenta or Light Cyan , we have struggled with this, in the end we have now cut the grey in vinyl and overlaid the Peach circle design , i have gone onto the Roland site and suggested what they said by printing it in 2 Parts with grey using control Density setting only then returning to origin point set to print the peach colour but the Grey is still the same and streaking

[Simon Worrall]

Good save, Jamie.
I have had to do exactly this on a number of occasions!

My SPS540 cant print light blue/green properly.

[Mike Thornley]

We run an SP540V

In versa works try the changing the setting in >Quality >Colour management change the option to ‘Density Control Only’ this seems to get close to greys for us when wanting more greyscale colours.

Also if you haven’t got daylight bulbs in your place etc, check the print outside in daylight. I know seems obvious but interior lighting can affect what you are looking at.

Good luck

[Jamie Hunt]

Hi Mike see my post earlier i already tried changing the Density Control

[Stephen Morriss]

I’ve always had this problem too, the closest I got was when my SP540 was changed to UVL inks and the printer was profiled.
I’ve now got the problem of matching a grey from the old SP on UVL inks using a new SG540 on Truevis inks and I’m getting greys with a green tint.
It’s driving me mad as I’ve got to print a replacement logo for a bonnet repair and I’ve also got a new van to sign this week with a 3m print down each side, all with green fades and grey fades so I’ve got no chance of doing a multi pass print.

Steve