Panelview Plus Printing Problem with Colors

I have searched the board and also the AB boards, but I can't find anything that can resolve my issue.

I am using the print screen set-up on a Panelview Plus 1250 to make hardcopies of the screens and the colors come out completely incorrect upon printing.

The only printer I have access to is a Ricoh Aficic MP C4500 PCL 6 printer. When I have a black background screen, it prints in a bright blue. Pink turns bright yellow. Blue turns bright red, and so on. This makes the screen dumps look terrible and difficult to read.

I suspect my issue might be printer driver related, but there is no where that I can see on how to get the right one installed on this machine.

Any advice on what I maybe missing? Or how to correct this?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or assistance.

Brett

You could do what I do, use a screen capture program and save them to jpegs. Then you could us any of available paint-style program out there to print the real colors.

Yes, I do use JPEG's and screen prints off my computer to make manuals and such. But, in this application, my customer is requesting that I make screen prints off of the panelview directly as AB has this as a feature on their Panelview Plus monitors.

Sad thing is that when I print them, they look worse than ****... and this doesn't make them smile. They also don't see why they would need to go out an buy another printer when this expensive one fits all their needs.

Brett

Have you searched A-B's Knowledge base? If that doesn't yield anything, call Allen Bradley.

I have already searched the AB knowledge base with no luck. As for the AB reps I have had luck with these technical issues. In fact the local AB house doesn't currently have anyone currently in this type of position... but I have had great luck with the expertise on this forum. So I am giving it try here.

I was able to find an old printer here to verify that the panelview plus would screen print the proper colors on some printers. I found an old network color HP Inkjet printer, and found that it prints with the right colors. I have tried an older Ricoh Aticio 3235c printer and it also prints the wrong colors.


I am still assuming that the issue is with the print drivers... but I don't know how to install the print drivers into a panelview plus system. Does anyone know of any suggestions? Or if this can actually be done?

Thanks,

Brett

I suspect that the PV+ is using as a default driver what, IIRC, is called HPPCL (Hewlett Packard Printer Control Language). Many non-HP prints used to be able to be placed in a mode that would emulate a HP printer because of its popularity. I would suggest exploring this with the printers that didn't appear to work; its the only thing I can think of right off the cuff.

I suspect you are right with the printer driver. Does anyone know specifically how to add a new driver to a AB Panelview Plus 1250 model? If it was the CE version, I think I could handle this, but with it being a "skinny version" of CE and not having the windows type interface, I am struggling on how to load a driver into this box. Any suggestions?

Brett