Need Help No colour vibrancy on Roland BN20

[wal putnish]

I have recently purchased a Roland BN20 and when printing, colours all look to be washed out and often not the same colour as you see in Corel (and I do understand the monitor issue when viewing on line, but fundamental pantone colours dont come out right) - there is no vibrancy to them, even black comes out less than black. Has anyone found a way to make the BN20 actually print vibrant colours, or do I need to sell it and buy some other machine?

 

[shoresigns]

Commercial printers tend to need a lot of fine tuning in order to print vibrant and accurate colours.

Does it run on VersaWorks like their wide format printers? If so, then you probably have the ability to tune all the same colour management settings as a larger printer.

However, you're never going to match all the Pantone colours. That's a fundamental disadvantage of CMYK printing—some colours will be a lot duller (oranges especially). Do you have a Pantone bridge swatch book? It shows you roughly what to expect when converting different Pantone colours to CMYK.

 

[wal putnish]

Yep runs versaworks but not clear how to optimise colours.

 

[AKwrapguy]

Yep runs versaworks but not clear how to optimise colours.

A lot of this issue is going to be your profile set up. I suggest that you create you own profiles for each media and update them from time to time. This will help with consistent quality. You should be able to find tutorials on line on how to set up profiles, colors for versaworks.

 

[Bigdawg]

The generic profiles work pretty well. Try changing the color management to Density Control Only and see what type of colors you are getting. That might give you an idea of whether it is your files or the profiles. But as others mentioned - profiles make a HUGE difference!

Is it the same washout on all types of material?

 

[shoresigns]

Yep runs versaworks but not clear how to optimise colours.

The first thing to do is look on the manufacturer's website for your print media to see if they have profiles for your printer. Profiles from the manufacturers can be hit and miss, but often they'll be better than the built-in Roland profiles in VersaWorks. You can also try profiles from other manufacturers that make the same type of media that you're using, i.e. if you have _____ brand of vinyl with a matte finish, you could try a matte vinyl profile from Avery or 3M and see how well it prints.

The second important setting is your Colour Management mode. The default is Pre-press US, but we find the Sign&Display setting gives us more vivid colours on our Roland, without oversaturating photos. The Density Control Only setting can be helpful if you're trying to push primary and secondary colours to their limits, but isn't usually great for photos.

This is the approach most small print shops use for colour management – it's a lot of trial and error, and it isn't really "colour management".

When you're ready, the pro method of colour management is to use a spectrophotometer to create your own profiles for your materials, and then re-linearize them from time to time. This will give you the most accurate colours possible, the best possible matches for Pantone colours, less time and money spent on reprints, neutral greyscale prints, and you'll save a substantial amount on your ink costs. There's a learning curve, a lot of initial setup time and about $2500 of hardware required (X-Rite i1Publish Pro 2 is the industry standard).

 

[Joe House]

The BN-20 is quite capable of hitting the same color gamut as the VS series printers can. I have seen very high quality prints come off of a BN-20 printer. I think most here are correct in assuming that the color settings in your RIP need to be fine tuned. There are a lot of variables that play into this though. Not just profile selection, but print mode, color management settings (I like Sign and Display for my default as well) but also the file. What color mode is the artwork (I generally prefer RGB for vivid colors) and what if any embedded profile?
These are just a few things that need to be mastered to get great prints.