topic Plot VS Printing - Screen Color Matching in Documentation

Plot VS Printing - Screen Color Matching

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 10:18:02 GMT

Hi ppl

I've bought a new plotter, HP Designjet T1530 PS and I've encountered a lot of problems trying to match screen colors and the impressed colors on paper. I'm using Archicad 21 an I've noticed differences in colors when using plot or printing. Can someone explain me why? When I chosse print colors appear much more light and unreal, and when I hit plot colors look much more real and almost match what I see on the screen (after printed on paper).

thanks

Re: Plot VS Printing

Barry Kelly — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 00:58:16 GMT

I have never used Plot so I can't comment on that.
But when you print you will have options for the Printer Setup.
In there you should find settings that control the quality of the print.
These may be set to a low or draft quality by default.

Barry.

Re: Plot VS Printing

Anonymous — Sun, 11 Mar 2018 04:26:24 GMT

Without buying a good quality monitor (eg HP dreamcolour or Dell Ultrasharp) and a hardware calibration system and regularly updating the profiles there will always be a difference between screen display and printed output.
Difference between plot and print output would be due to the differing printer languages used, plot likely to be using HPGL2 and printing if using windows default installed driver likely to be PCL. I would change windows driver to a postscript driver, although not as pretty as the default driver you will get better and more consistent results with the postscript driver and pdf will print faster. My workflow is that any printing is from PDF so I always have a record copy of any document.
Scott

Re: Plot VS Printing

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 17:43:08 GMT

Thanks for the help.
I'll try printing from PDF to test the colors. It still amazes me the difference between print and plot.. The fantastic and unbelievable world of printing drivers

Re: Plot VS Printing - Screen Color Matching

Karl Ottenstein — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 17:54:33 GMT

I would be surprised if a 'plot' driver even knows about color profiles and believe those drivers exist only for legacy purposes.

Your printer is a large format printer, not a plotter. 😉 The lightness that you see probably relates to the color specific settings of the printer driver as well as any profile mismatches between your print file and what the printer is expecting. Colors will also differ based on the paper being used, and the printer will need to compensate for that - so be sure you specify the type of paper in the print dialogs, too...

The somewhat dated article here relates to color matching for photographers, but the principals of color matching for monitors and printers are identical for our lower resolution needs:

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/2025119943/printer-primer-2-print-workflow