Xerox 700 color matching difficulties

[Digital Prepress Girl]

I had the same problem with our Xerox 700. Since most of our colors are converted to CMYK in InDesign we have to protect the colors in our Creo front end at the printer. That means entering in the builds for each color into Creo. We when protect the color before printing, it's in the colors tab in Creo. It is very close to the same every time now. We went back and forth with Xerox thinking it was a cruddy printer. It also has to do with calibrating. We run only 2 stocks really. So if we are using 100lb Silk Text we Calibrate on that. We also print a sheet out every morning and see if there is a difference between each day. If they are the same we don't worry. But if it's way off then we call Xerox. I feel your pain. We bought the printer in August and in the past 3 weeks have finally been running great.
My Xerox rep said that Freeflow and Fiery may not be able to protect CMYK. Good luck!

[Digital Prepress Girl]

Richtapia- The Xerox Tech would run different tests then send them someplace for color analysis to look at. They said the prints were withing specs. It really depends on what you select for calibration too when you go to print. Sometimes we have to select a different one than the last time we ran the same job. There is no rhyme or reason sometimes why the printer acts the way it does. We've had all the techs that we can out to figure out the Creo and the printer. Creo themselves do not have training on their front ends. Not all Creos are the same either. Our 7000 which is 3 years old has an older Creo that does not have all the capabilities as the new one. But the older one has less problems. I would press Xerox to do all they can. We did. We have monthly meetings with them to make sure they are doing what they should be since it's their printer.

[ksherrod]

Not using a 700...but for general workflow I calibrate all of our machines in the morning, and its not uncommon to again have to calibrate later in the day to match something printed previously. Sometimes I have found it to help to run a little on the machine every morning before calibrating...not a whole lot, just maybe 10-20 prints. But also depending on your climate...I find that the color on these machines are affected by several different variables...temperature, humidity, electricity, developer life, and stock. So obviously if you proof at 8am when your shop is maybe cooler, and then you run the job at 11am when all the machines are running and its warmer...it will look different. We are using Fiery front ends and a Creo.

What you might find useful also is only using one densitometer (if you have multiple machines that you are trying to keep similar)...we do this on our 2045 and 2060 as they both have Fierys, so we only hook up the densitometer to one of them and use it for both.

Unfortunately the reality of these machines (by Xerox or anybody else) is that they aren't perfect for color always. The color is usually sellable, and you should be able to reproduce the same job over and over again with only a small degree of variance, but an exact match is just not reasonable. I would make sure to communicate with your customers that same expectation so that they know what they are paying for too with the lower cost of printing digitally versus offset. We sell our color as "similar" and use proofs and samples to manage color for critical applications and we are more successful that way than if we tell the customer that we will dead match everything.