Question Printer Colors are Completely Wrong

[koberulz]

Print a Test Page Online - A Simple Printer Test Page

Print a test page online. This is a page for testing printers by the use of A4 Printer test pages. Simple and one-click printer testing

www.printatestpage.com

Canon G3630.

 

[Lutfij]

Canon G3630
What is the status of the ink levels

on all colors?

You've used the link above to help you print, what happens when you print a document off of your system's drive?

 

[koberulz]

What is the status of the ink levels on all colors?

They're all full, or near enough.

You've used the link above to help you print, what happens when you print a document off of your system's drive?

The same thing. I printed that page to try and figure out why other prints were looking off.

 

[Pimpom]

Looks like cyan and black are absent or nearly so. Maybe the print heads are clogged. Has the printer been lying unused for some time?

 

[koberulz]

If that were true, though, wouldn't those areas come out white?

 

[Pimpom]

I've analysed the sample page and it seems that the cyan area is not a true cyan. It's a mixture of cyan and magenta. That would explain why the area is printed as a pale magenta.

The dark blue areas, including the border scales, are also a mixture of cyan and magenta in different proportions and saturation, with a tiny bit of black. So they also come out as a different shade of magenta.

 

[koberulz]

And black? Even black and white prints are coming out orange.

 

[Pimpom]

As I said in my first reply, black is also absent in the printout. The "Black" in the "Black Background" area is medium grey. In the absence of black ink, it comes out as yet another shade of magenta with perhaps a bit of yellow.

As for white, the "Blank Background" area at the top of your printout looks virtually the same as the paper outside the print area.

 

[koberulz]

But why is the black coming out orange instead of invisible? Your contention is that everything has some amount of magenta and yellow in it, even when printing in black and white?

I'm also not sure why a touch of magenta in the blue would make it as saturated as it is. The whole thing just seems weird.

 

[USAFRet]

But why is the black coming out orange instead of invisible? Your contention is that everything has some amount of magenta and yellow in it, even when printing in black and white?

I'm also not sure why a touch of magenta in the blue would make it as saturated as it is. The whole thing just seems weird.

"black" is often a mix of colors, not just pure and only the black pigment.

 

[Pimpom]

I was typing a reply when USAFRet's post came in. He's right. Let me add a few details.

Colours are almost never pure in real life. Black, red, whatever. A blue sky is not pure blue. Green leaves are never pure green. There's always some subtle shade of other colours blended with the dominant one. So when the printer doesn't/can't apply the correct amounts of CMYK inks, the result is some weird shade.

That said, the "black" background in the digital image is a true gray, with Red, Green, Blue values of 178, 178, 178 in a 24-bit palette; CMYK values are 0, 0, 0, 30. In theory, the printout in the absence of black ink should be blank.

However - and I'm making an educated guess here - the printer driver's algorithm probably introduces other shades to compensate for the lack of a perfectly black shade in the black ink to make a rich black print.

 

[koberulz]

Surely if one prints in black and white (as in, selecting that in the printer settings, not just as in printing a source with no discernible color), only black ink is used?

 

[USAFRet]

Surely if one prints in black and white (as in, selecting that in the printer settings, not just as in printing a source with no discernible color), only black ink is used?

One would think so.

But that is often not the case.

https://www.epson.co.uk/en_GB/faq/KA-01507/contents?loc=en-us