[Allyson227]

Hi,
Is there anyone who can advise on the correct settings to print high quality glossy, 2 sided point of sale sheets on a Canon iR C3200?

When we bought it, we had the idea that we could do short run POS printing and get close to professional quality ourselves. And that was demonstrated when we got the printer. However, a year later, I have not been able to get the quality I need. The printer has been recalibrated and serviced recently. I have tried using paper recommended by IKON, who sold us the printer and no luck.

The other thing is that I am printing from pdf's and I think I need to go back to originals but I don't know what format I need or what settings to use.

Thanks much for any help you can give,
Allyson

[slipe]

You do get some resolution degrading when you distill a very high resolution document to PDF. But it is usually high enough quality to give very good prints directly from the PDF. Many local print houses will suggest you send a PDF rather than mess with over-compressing a JPG or trying to send giant TIFFs. My best guess is that the problem is most likely with the original you are distilling to the PDF.

You don’t say what is wrong with the output or what you are printing.
Is it mixed text and graphics?
Is the quality bad for both the text and graphics?
Is it grainy, the colors off – what?
What program are you using to make the brochure?

I took a quick look through your printer driver manual and it seems if you leave the color in auto detect, the profile in default and select the right paper you should get pretty good prints if you are sending a high quality source.

I don’t have experience with color laser printers. From reports it seems your text and vector graphics should be superb and raster graphics very good for what you are doing. I’ll drop you my email and you can send me the PDF if you want. I could probably tell you right away whether the PDF should be making good prints.

[Allyson227]

Thanks for your reply! I will forward the pdf to the address you provided. The main problem is that the prints I am getting are not as clear and bright as the prints from the professional printer.

I just went back to the drawing board and did some prints on regular paper. I've been thinking I had to use glossy paper but comparing the prints I think I might want to just use a heavier stock of paper with a regular finish paper.

I appreciate your time and look forward to your advice about the sample I send to you.

Thanks,
Allyson

[slipe]

The quality and resolution of the PDF file is more than sufficient. I would guess the commercial printing you like is from the PDF.

Commercial printers usually auto-enhance photos. You might like the output from your printer if you did the same with the images in the file. I know of no way to enhance the entire PDF all at once. I just grabbed one of the images from the PDF and brought it up to where it would look better from my inkjet.

Images that look a little artificial onscreen often look better in print because printing is a subtractive process. I sharpened it a little but would probably have sharpened it even more for print. I have a plug-in sharpener that leaves the images looking terrible onscreen when I set it up for my printer and output size. I almost dumped the program until I tried printing one of the images. It looked great.

You might also try enhancing the colors a little in your print driver. Increase the contrast a little and I would guess you increase the saturation by increasing the different color arrows. My Canon inkjet printer driver isn’t nearly as sophisticated as yours. I don’t have that screen at all, so I can’t do more than guess how it works.

[Allyson227]

This gives me some direction on what to do next. Thanks so much for your help!
Allyson