Color and Grayscale Printing

Printing documents in full color or with very high-quality black and white (grayscale) images is more complex than printing black and white or spot-color documents. Understanding some of the principles of color and grayscale printing and how various products can fit into color and grayscale solutions can help you integrate color and grayscale printing with your current operations or expand to implement new color workflows.

In this section:

  1. AFP color and grayscale solutions
    You can assemble printing products from Ricoh and other companies in different configurations to support Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) color and grayscale printing, including configurations that use the AFP Color Management Object Content Architecture (CMOCA) to provide optimal performance and color accuracy in high-speed color printing.
  2. Color Printing Concepts
    Color printing is significantly more complicated than black and white printing. If you understand some of the complexities, you can make the transition from black and white printing to grayscale or color printing more smoothly.
  3. Grayscale Printing Concepts
    With grayscale printing you can reproduce color images as high-quality black and white images by using many shades of gray to represent subtle variations in color and light. Printing solutions that produce high-quality grayscale output use color printing concepts with a black and white printer that supports them to achieve that effect.
  4. Color Management
    Images, graphics, and photographs often appear different depending on the monitor or the printer you use. The colors printed by one printer might not match the colors printed on another printer, even if they came from the same source. If it is important that colors stay consistent from camera, scanner, or monitor to printer, you must use color management practices.
  5. AFP Color Management
    There are various ways to print color data with Advanced Function Presentation (AFP). However, to implement an AFP color printing solution with full color management, you must use color management resources (CMRs). We also recommend that you install all your color images as data objects and associate CMRs with them.
  6. RICOH AFP color and grayscale products
    Ricoh provides a variety of products that support AFP color and grayscale printing. They can be used in various combinations to create color workflow solutions.
  7. AFP color solution scenarios
    AFP color solutions from Ricoh can be assembled in a variety of configurations based on your environment and needs.
  8. Related publications
    You can find more information about AFP color printing on the Web sites of Ricoh and the AFP Color Consortium.
Parent topic: Overview