HP Designjet Z5200ps Photo Printer - Color calibration

Color calibration enables your printer to produce consistent colors with the particular printheads, inks and paper type that you are using, and under your particular environmental conditions. After color calibration, you can expect to get identical prints from any two different printers situated in different geographical locations.

Calibration should be done in any of the following circumstances:

• Whenever a printhead is replaced
• Whenever a new paper type is introduced that has not yet been calibrated with the current set of printheads
• Whenever a certain amount of printing has been done since the last calibration
• Whenever the printer has been turned off for a long period of time
• Whenever the environmental conditions (temperature and humidity) change significantly

The printer driver usually reminds you with an alert whenever you need to perform color calibration, unless you have disabled the alerts. However, there will be no alert if the environmental conditions change.

You should calibrate a paper type before creating its color profile; however, you can later recalibrate without needing to recreate the color profile.

You can turn off color calibration from the front panel: select the Image Quality Maintenance menu icon , then set Enable color calibration to OFF. In this case, the printer will use a default calibration set in the factory for all paper types. If you later turn color calibration back on, it will still remember any calibrations that you performed earlier.

You can check the color calibration status of the currently loaded paper at any time by pressing the View loaded paper key on the front panel. The status may be one of the following:

• PENDING: the paper has not been calibrated.

  note:

  Whenever you update the printer's firmware, the color calibration status of all papers is reset to PENDING. See Update the firmware.

• OBSOLETE: the paper has been calibrated, but the calibration is now out of date for one of the reasons mentioned above, and should be repeated.
• OK: the paper has been calibrated, and the calibration is up to date.
• N/A: this paper cannot be calibrated. The following paper types cannot be calibrated: plain paper, transparent materials, and textured glossy paper (such as HP Collector Satin Canvas). They can, however, be profiled.

You can start color calibration in the following ways:

• From the printer driver alert that recommends calibration.
• From the HP Color Center: select Paper Preset Management > Calibrate Paper.
• From the front panel: select the Image Quality Maintenance menu icon , then Calibrate color.

The calibration process is fully automatic and can be performed unattended after you have loaded paper of the type you wish to calibrate—which should be A4, Letter or any larger size.

The process takes about 8–10 minutes and consists of the following steps.

1. A calibration test chart is printed, which contains patches of each ink used in your printer.
   
2. The chart is allowed to dry for a period of time that depends on the paper type, so that the colors have time to stabilize.
3. The chart is scanned and measured using the HP Embedded Spectrophotometer.
4. From the measurements made by the spectrophotometer, the printer calculates the necessary correction factors to apply for consistent color printing on that paper type. It also calculates the maximum amount of each ink that can be applied to the paper.

note:

If color calibration fails, check whether a color is missing from the chart. A missing color may be caused by a printhead problem: see Troubleshooting ink cartridge and printhead issues.

note:

Matte black is not used on glossy or satin papers, so that column of the chart is not printed when calibrating those paper types.

When you use Adobe Photoshop CS3 (or later version) for Windows, the Print window can warn you if the paper needs color calibration, and can provide an icon to launch the HP Utility to perform the calibration.

To enable this capability under Windows XP, you must download and install the following free software packages from Microsoft's Web site:

• Microsoft Core XML Services (MSXML) 6.0
• Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack 1.0