Rgb Vinyl Printers

[asd]

i've being doing signs for about 10 years now as an employee and as a owner sometimes we print on vinyl sometimes we cut vinyl, so lets make this short and to the point I have a customer that we do all kinds of promotional items for them, business cards, banners, vehicles graphics etc. Not to long ago I had some vinyl printed by a vendor here and one of the colors that was printed was way off like 40% lighter than the original, we get in a back and forth discussion about the color being off and I was given this explanation for the color being 40% lighter "we print in rgb mode" this was a first to me, but because I don't have a printer that prints on vinyl in rgb mode doesn't mean it doesn't exist so my question is. is there a vinyl printer out there that prints in rgb? I know most if not all them print in cmyk

 

[Solventinkjet]

RGB has a much bigger color gamut than CMYK. On a non-profiled printer, you can trick the printer into printing a slightly wider gamut by designing in RGB and letting the RIP convert it to CMYK values. This tends to just saturate the colors more in my experience. Although this works, it is not the professional way to do things. It's more of a band aid than a fix. The professional way to do it would be to have your machine profiled properly. When profiled properly, you should be able to design in CMYK and hit every color you need with consistency. Your supplier is probably like most small to medium size print shops and does color management by eye and on the fly. It works well for short runs and customers who don't care about exact color but it fails horribly when you have to hit a specific color or keep consistency as time goes by.

 

[dypinc]

If the color you are specifying is not a Spot Color then did you assign a working color space to the file you sent? If not the vendor has to guess and could have guessed wrong when converting from your colors to the output device colors.

 

[reQ]

If i do original design, i always do RGB since my Roland prints MUCH richer colors using RGB. I tried bazillion combinations but RGB was always better than CMYK. Different story if i get already designed logo/artwork in CMYK - then i do everything in CMYK mode.

 

[asd]

I always used the same values in cmyk for business cards, banners and some in house vinyl printing and because we don't have the same equipment i understand there are going to be color variations from one printer to another, the business cards, banners and my printed decals were fine, but what I received from the vendor was not even close to values in the cmyk chart and this was printed from an eps file, not jpeg, tiff or pdf. i just didn't buy the "we print in rgb mode"

 

[bob]

RGB has a much bigger color gamut than CMYK. On a non-profiled printer, you can trick the printer into printing a slightly wider gamut by designing in RGB and letting the RIP convert it to CMYK values. This tends to just saturate the colors more in my experience.

True. Firstly the RIP can conver RGB to CMYK orders of magnitude better than mopst any design software. Secondly, by always printing at at least 4 times the resolution of any bitmap data you get at least 4^16 possible color combinations for each pixel input. Actually far more with variable color density.

Although this works, it is not the professional way to do things. It's more of a band aid than a fix. The professional way to do it would be to have your machine profiled properly...

Twaddle. While this probably thrills all of the buck coloristas to their follicle pits, it's results that count. It's not how you got there, it's that you got there.

 

[eahicks]

LOL...an RGB printer? I don't think so. Every printer is CMYK, most actually being CMYKLcLm, or some variation of. RGB is pretty much limited to anything emitting light....your monitor, a TV, LEDs....designing in RGB is not the best thing for print. Leave that to your website design. If you want to match colors, you need to be designing in CMYK and using spot colors. CMYK translates to CMYK with more accuracy, RGB to CMYK (which your RIP does for you) always washes out colors and produces poor results. There is a wealth of information on this on the interwebs, I urge you to research if you don't already understand it all.

 

[dypinc]

Almost all aqueous printers you can address as a RGB device. Internal converted to the inkset which often includes green, orange and violet or some variant of resulting in very wide gamut in some cases matching or exceeding AdobeRGB. Many eco-solvent/solvent devices also use these colors combination resulting in some cases equally wide gamut, much more than your common CMYK offset press working color space. So if you want to take advantage of that wide gamut in these CMYK addressable printer do not use CMYK offset press working color spaces any where in your printflow be it in design or in conversion in the RIP. Best use is to use RGB and convert in the RIP to the device output CMYK color space which takes advantage of that wider gamut. If you want to match CMYK offset press working color spaces or are a color monkey and have no clue what you're doing color management wise then I would recommend uses CMYK offset press working color space to design in. Making a mistake in RGB conversion to device Output Device profile will show very easily, so if you design in RGB and send the file out for printing make absolutely sure you assign the RGB color space or convey that to the printer.

 

[Pauly]

Does anyone actually have an idea what they're talking about?

You can design or photograph in any colorspace you desire...
For example, You design a poster in sRGB (standard in photoshop). Once it's saved properly with the profile embedded. You'll open it with the RIP (Raster Image Processor) and that will convert the sRGB file you've given it to the colour space your printer can print with which will be an output profile in CMYK.

You can design in CMYK if you wish, but still that CMYK setting has a profile like US Coated SWOP v2. which is NOT the same CMYK profile that your printer used.

You can get that CMYK design file, put it in your RIP, then it'll still convert it to your printers output profile.

Your RIP will convert anything with an embedded profile to your printers profile.

You cannot extend the gamut of your printer by using by designing in a different colour space. UNLESS the colour space you're designing in is smaller than your printers colour space.


To the OP:
EPS files cannot embed ICC profiles. So if you're using a colour space like Photopro RGB, and you send it to someone who doesn't know that. They'll put it in the RIP and the RIP will assign it a profile, most likely by default sRGB and the colours will be way off.

 

[ColoPrinthead]

Anyone heard of Light Jet, Lambda, or photofilms? Obviously those don't relate in this instance but are worth remembering. OP, your vendor sucks if if your colors are off by that much and the only way I can think someone would wind up that far from your target color is by using the wrong media profile.

 

[eahicks]

Does anyone actually have an idea what they're talking about?

You can design or photograph in any colorspace you desire...
For example, You design a poster in sRGB (standard in photoshop). Once it's saved properly with the profile embedded. You'll open it with the RIP (Raster Image Processor) and that will convert the sRGB file you've given it to the colour space your printer can print with which will be an output profile in CMYK.

You can design in CMYK if you wish, but still that CMYK setting has a profile like US Coated SWOP v2. which is NOT the same CMYK profile that your printer used.

You can get that CMYK design file, put it in your RIP, then it'll still convert it to your printers output profile.

Your RIP will convert anything with an embedded profile to your printers profile.

You cannot extend the gamut of your printer by using by designing in a different colour space. UNLESS the colour space you're designing in is smaller than your printers colour space.


To the OP:
EPS files cannot embed ICC profiles. So if you're using a colour space like Photopro RGB, and you send it to someone who doesn't know that. They'll put it in the RIP and the RIP will assign it a profile, most likely by default sRGB and the colours will be way off.

Well your mostly right....
ANYWAY.... what the original post was, was regarding an RGB PRINTER. And no, there still isn't.

 

[Pauly]

Well your mostly right....
ANYWAY.... what the original post was, was regarding an RGB PRINTER. And no, there still isn't.

Well Yes and No.

There area "RGB" printers. which are CMYK printers that already have a profile internally. So if you where to calibrate and create an ICC profile for one, It'll be done using RGB charts.

So
Yes - There are printers that can use the RGB colour space directly.
No - There's no printer that will print in Red Green and Blue inks only. Note some printers you can add other colours like orange, purple ect including reds greens and blues. But no printer with ONLY RGB inks.

Please elaborate where i'm wrong?