HP Latex 560 - Pantone Color Matching

[FactorDesign]

I'll start by saying the vast majority of experience in wide format printing has been working in small shops with Roland printers, and printing with either Versaworks or FlexiSign, so there's a good chance I'm either overlooking something obvious or was just never trained in the proper methods of color matching with a latex printer and more advanced RIP software (Onyx 18)

Setup:
HP Latex 560
All heads original with about 2L through them
New cleaning cartridge installed
Media: 3M IJ180c V3
Profile: 8 pass 600dpi
Media has been 'calibrated' on the machine.
All heads appear good in the dropout tests.

Most of the time the requested pantone colors in PDF files made in Illustrator match, or are close enough to not worry about. Sometimes they are a little off and I can use swatch books to make small adjustments.

Recently I've been dealing with multiple colors that are either light beige (matching a paint color) or medium greyish (Pantone 430C), and simply unable to come close.
When printing 430C, the result is something with a purplish color, but nowhere near close to 430C.

As a test, I printed out the full pantone chart from the Onyx samples folder, and it appears quite a few of the colors are very far away from what the pantone book shows and I'm worried that the printer is becoming less accurate with color over time or that I've managed to tweak something in the software either in Onyx or on the printer that would cause the printer to no longer print as expected.

I've attached a printout of 430c vs the pantone color chart as an example.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to where to start to figure out if it's either the printer, Onyx, the alignment of the planets, or some other problem I'm not thinking of that might be throwing off the colors or how to get them back to matching?

 

[balstestrat]

What if you duplicate the profile, reset color calibration, do color calibration and create new ICC profile. You could also switch to 10pass to get a bit more color out.

 

[FactorDesign]

What if you duplicate the profile, reset color calibration, do color calibration and create new ICC profile. You could also switch to 10pass to get a bit more color out.

Thanks, I'll give that a go. When we first got this printer I really felt like it matched colors much better. Maybe it's just the colors we are printing or something has changed with the print media. Both IJ180c V3 and Oracal 3651 Clear have been real problems recently.

 

[ikarasu]

have you redone color calibrations at all?

 

[FactorDesign]

have you redone color calibrations at all?

Yes,
I was told it was a good idea to do on each new roll of media and I've continued to do that, as well as when the printer prompts that the calibration is out of date on any medias that we only print occasionally.
While attempting to diagnose this issue I've also run calibrations from inside of Onyx, but they didn't have any noticeable changes

 

[dypinc]

How old is your lc/lm printhead. For what ever reason it is very problematic. Maybe because of only one printhead, but if color accuracy is important especially where the light inks are being used you need to replace the lc/lm printhead fairly regularly. 2L is more than you want to go with this printhead.

 

[Pauly]

Sounds like you have an understanding on colour matching.
First off, Do you have a spectrophotometer?

secondly, is that print with spot colour replacement on or off? as it looks like the profile greyscale isn't very good.

Onyx has a spot colour library with all pantone colours with values. you can enable spot colours and as long as it's a spot colour in illustrator (and named correctly) onyx will recognise it and replace it with the value onyx has. you can edit the spot colour library with your own values etc so if you do a job with the same spot colour, it'll have the adjusted colour ready to go.

The best way to get the values is with "swatchbooks" inside onyx. having a i1pro will help a lot or you can eyeball it.

 

[Bly]

Like Pauly said, use Onyx swatchooks. First try the Pantone colour, then measure the Pantone swatch with your i1 if that's not close.
Having said that I had trouble on our 360s even repeating the same colour printed 5 minutes before.
Light/medium greys and pastels were the hardest to hit.

 

[FactorDesign]

What if you duplicate the profile, reset color calibration, do color calibration and create new ICC profile. You could also switch to 10pass to get a bit more color out.

Thanks, I tried this before leaving yesterday I created a profile from scratch using the settings from the 3M profile, but not copying it. Ran through the full process and the colors are slightly different, but not closer to being accurate. I also got an Error 79:04 while performing an alignment and substrate advance test print, and later when the test print did finish I noticed that it did not dry the substrate advance test print at all.

How old is your lc/lm printhead. For what ever reason it is very problematic. Maybe because of only one printhead, but if color accuracy is important especially where the light inks are being used you need to replace the lc/lm printhead fairly regularly. 2L is more than you want to go with this printhead.

Thanks, I will try this. The printhead was installed 5/19 when we got the machine, and has 2075mL through it. If 2L is enough to cause issues, that's right on the line. I had considered replacing all the heads to be safe, but the test plots show them in near perfect condition.

Sounds like you have an understanding on colour matching.
First off, Do you have a spectrophotometer?

secondly, is that print with spot colour replacement on or off? as it looks like the profile greyscale isn't very good.

Onyx has a spot colour library with all pantone colours with values. you can enable spot colours and as long as it's a spot colour in illustrator (and named correctly) onyx will recognise it and replace it with the value onyx has. you can edit the spot colour library with your own values etc so if you do a job with the same spot colour, it'll have the adjusted colour ready to go.

The best way to get the values is with "swatchbooks" inside onyx. having a i1pro will help a lot or you can eyeball it.

I wouldn't say I understand color matching correctly because I've really had to just learn on the job over the years, but normally I can look at something and make a few tweaks and it's good. Now the tweaks have inconsistent or illogical changes to the output, or the first starting points are so far away from the target its hard to know where to start, and if its hardware or software / calibration related.

We don't have an i1 Pro unfortunately, and I don't think there's budget set aside for one at the moment.

The printer is printing with Spot Color Replacement on, but other than the inbuilt pantone library, there are no changes saved to this profile. I actually didn't know how to save those replacements to the print profile until yesterday, so at least I learned something from all of this!

 

[balstestrat]

79:04 just a generic firmware error, not much to do if you have the newest FW.

2L of printhead usage is not much at all especially on the optimizer and light head where the ink is not so thick as in the colour heads. The issue is that yours has been sitting in the printer for that long and not used enough. 560 you should be using 2L of ink per week.
The nozzle test doesn't always tell everything. Because of the age I'd probably also consider replacing them. Colours at least, optimizer is probably still good to go.

 

[balstestrat]

On more thing that popped up in my mind. Because you print so little, take out the cartridges and shake 'em real good. Add this to your monthly schedule.
Do not replace printheads before doing this and printing at least ~30ml of each colour.

 

[FactorDesign]

LC/LM has been replaced. It automatically did a print which I assume is the alignment, and prompted to recalibrate.
Recalibrated and also did ICC profiling, which seemed OK. Tried printing a test of the Pantone 430C I've struggled to match and the printer did it's startup and 'preparing to print' message stayed on the screen.
The machine advanced to where it preheats the start of the print area and just froze there, long enough that the media started to bubble and warp.
No error message on the machine, but Onyx said 'Check Printer'. Buttons not responsive on the screen other than waking it if it turned off, so I had to hold the front power button to turn it off.

Machine bunched up the media and crashed the head as soon as it turned on and now has an Error 86:01

Turned off the machine and fixed the bunched up bit by pulling it through. The backing of the paper looks melted and has taken on a rough texture, likely the air release pattern showing through to the back. The front of the media is heavily warped and bubbled. Would normal temps do this with prolonged exposure from it crashing, or do I need to worry that the heater might be operating too high as well?

Note, this is with the media attached to a take-up reel and tension bar in place. I've had media curl before if it's just the lead edge and not advanced far enough, but never when attached to the roll, so it must have been really stuck inside of the dryer.

 

[P Wagner]

Thanks, I'll give that a go. When we first got this printer I really felt like it matched colors much better. Maybe it's just the colors we are printing or something has changed with the print media. Both IJ180c V3 and Oracal 3651 Clear have been real problems recently.

Are there any ink channels reporting as expired? You can find this information at the printer front panel, under the ink icon. If there are expired inks in the printer, you'll want to get them replaced with fresh ink.

 

[FactorDesign]

Are there any ink channels reporting as expired? You can find this information at the printer front panel, under the ink icon. If there are expired inks in the printer, you'll want to get them replaced with fresh ink.

We did have one ink cartridge that expired and I didn't notice before loading it into the machine, but I promptly removed it and replaced it with a fresh cartridge. This didn't stop the machine from throwing up a warning and it does say "see warranty note" for the M/Y heads. This has been like this for months and did not notice any printing differences in that time.

 

[balstestrat]

Is that in a manual?

Was that a joke?

You know I mean its built for that, not to sit doing nothing. Some sales guy has once again managed to sell the wrong model.

 

[FactorDesign]

Was that a joke?

You know I mean its built for that, not to sit doing nothing. Some sales guy has once again managed to sell the wrong model.

We went with the 560 vs the 365 due to rebates and trade ins at the time. We traded in a dead Epson GS6000, and gave away a worn out Surecolor S50675 to pick up one HP printer instead. We got it bundled with Onyx Thrive, along with a discount for our old 'free' version of onyx that came with the Epsons, and it wasn't much more than the 365 would have been.
I realize the 560 seems like somewhat overkill for us based on the usage numbers, but one of our primary businesses was trade show booth design and fabrication. In a normal year we would be printing far more, to the point where we'd considered a flatbed for the di-bond panels used in the booths, but we've had to shift to other parts of our business and tighten up our belts to make it through.

 

[balstestrat]

Considering that you have had it for 50% of time close to 9 months before covid it's still super low usage.

But I get it, like I said the sales guys are smart. If it feels like a good deal it's not always that. Right now today where Im at you can pick up a L365 for ~15000$ with zero tradeins.

 

[Chris - Charlotte]

I'll start by saying the vast majority of experience in wide format printing has been working in small shops with Roland printers, and printing with either Versaworks or FlexiSign, so there's a good chance I'm either overlooking something obvious or was just never trained in the proper methods of color matching with a latex printer and more advanced RIP software (Onyx 18)

Setup:
HP Latex 560
All heads original with about 2L through them
New cleaning cartridge installed
Media: 3M IJ180c V3
Profile: 8 pass 600dpi
Media has been 'calibrated' on the machine.
All heads appear good in the dropout tests.

Most of the time the requested pantone colors in PDF files made in Illustrator match, or are close enough to not worry about. Sometimes they are a little off and I can use swatch books to make small adjustments.

Recently I've been dealing with multiple colors that are either light beige (matching a paint color) or medium greyish (Pantone 430C), and simply unable to come close.
When printing 430C, the result is something with a purplish color, but nowhere near close to 430C.

As a test, I printed out the full pantone chart from the Onyx samples folder, and it appears quite a few of the colors are very far away from what the pantone book shows and I'm worried that the printer is becoming less accurate with color over time or that I've managed to tweak something in the software either in Onyx or on the printer that would cause the printer to no longer print as expected.

I've attached a printout of 430c vs the pantone color chart as an example.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to where to start to figure out if it's either the printer, Onyx, the alignment of the planets, or some other problem I'm not thinking of that might be throwing off the colors or how to get them back to matching?

We run 430C frequently. The color swatch we built in Illustrator comes out purple when the ICC profile is turned off to match the swatch in adobe. We have to turn ICC profiles on to match. Another work around would be building out of K only. I believe it is a 70% or 80% build