Getting the Best Color

When trying to get the best color for your copier, there is a tendency to believe what you have had is what you should get in the new copier. The best way to think about color is using a toast analogy. If you get a new toaster, and you were used to it taking 35 seconds on the old toaster to get it just how you liked it. You get the new toaster and the 35 seconds burns it, so you call the toaster company and tell them the toaster is wrong because the last toaster you had it took 35 seconds and now if you do 35, it burns the toast.

Basically, whenever you get a new copier, there will be a time where you have to learn the settings to get the color how you want. Sometimes that means you are going to have to waste a few sheets of paper to get it just the way you want it.

Here are some items to consider when you are trying to get the best color.

1. There are profiles, called ICC profiles, which interprets colors differently. Some of them go for a bold look, some use cmyk and others rgb. It is good to try a few to see the differences.
2. Paper quality matters – cheap paper makes worse prints like cheap bread makes worse toast.
3. The program you print from matters – If you use Illustrator it will come out differently than MS Word.
4. The monitor is not the standard for color. Most designers use CMYK for design, and your monitor is rgb. What does this mean? It is unlikely the screen looks EXACTLY like what the print would look like
5. Put 4 monitors side by side and each monitor will even have differnet colors. So the printer does not care what your monitor looks like, it cares about the file color.

There are settings that can make your print quality a ton better, but be aware it is not as simple as, the last one worked, what’s wrong with this one. With a solid copier, you will generally feel the quality improved without really doing anything.

If you want a high quality color copier, give us a call and we would love to help!