I have been running the iGen3 for 16 months now. I came from a B/W background running the 6135 and Nuvera for 11 years.
My company has the first iGen in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

I find myself doing much more maintenace then the Xerox Customer Manual requires me to do. Right now we run about 100,000 to 200,000 impressions a month.

I do my calibration every morning, there are minor fluxuations in the curves. I am sure this is normal.

Here are some of my issues.

I will run a job one week and then lets say the customer needs 1000 more the following week. Most of the time the colour will not match. Sometimes even day to day my colours will be off.

I find myself cleaning the Pre-Transfer grid, Yellow AC grid(magenta toner) and the Cyan Pin Scortron grid after 2000-3000 impression. There is a toner build up on the grids. Xerox says this is normal. My copy quality suffers if I don't clean them. Then I am cleaning all the grids after 10,000 imp. instead of the 50,000 posted.

Our iGen also runs high in magenta. Xerox has told us the machine is in spec. Could the problem be caused by our X-Right calibration strip?? it is now 15 months old. Of course we noticed the problem about 12 months ago.

Right now we are having a intermitent problem. There is a Cyan line running LE-TE and it moves OB-IB every copy. It will be on one to 100 sheets then it will disapear. It happened 3 times on a run of 145 and once(12imp) in 4000imp. We thought we had it fixed a month ago by changing the Cyan developer and purging the cyan toner. A month ago it was also doing it with magenta. The toner batches are good. I am just wondering if anyone has had the same problem so I can pass it on to our service reps. The toner purge value is set at 80.

I have already won the battle of changing the developer every 50,000-150,000 and the fuser 50'000 to 300,000.

I hope yopu can help.
Thanks
Damian

Damian,

We have three machiines and most of the problems you have mentioned seems to be in line with normal iGen issues. The maintenance manual is just a starting point and based on your customer expectations you have to adjust. Depending on which client we are producing for we change our maintenance habits.

We have found for color consistency we do not calibrate every day. What! I know, I know we are suppose to calibrate every day but what we have found is that the minor fluxuations in the curves that you mentioned can make a world of difference. Generally the iGen does a great job matching to one calibration from day to day. When it is calibrated it is changing how it produce the colors you printed the day before. We tend to do a Xerographic Setup (dc0951) more often than we calibrate. It adjusts the machine to get to the calibrated state.

The transfer grid is the one we work on the most for quality. If build up occur on it, it doesn't put enough charge out to get a good transfer. The other build up is normal. We change our Mod wires more than doing anything else to it.

The iGen has always run high in magenta. The newer machine handle it better than our older one. If you are referring to heavy magenta in flesh tones and skylines then you are dealing with a profile issue. The iGen has a wider color gamut and allows for brighter colors. It tends to blow out are with high concentrates of red/magenta areas. To help that try using a different profile other than iGen CMYK. We use Us Sheetfed and SWOP Plus (tone down the magenta) in its place. It's not a X-rite issue.

We also see the streaks that you are getting. It comes from small beads of toner or developer getting in different areas of the machine. The beads are probably stuck on your wire mod and as it vibrates the beads move from side to side. Just wipe them with off. If that does not do it try the silver roller below the pre-tranfer. It tends to get build up on it and it get stuck in the groove going across it.


lainrose

Also check the STAB area for frayed edges of the plastic tabs that stick up to hold the paper to the Transfer Belt. If these plastic tabs get worn down they fray and can collect toner and cause lines as well. Xerox has to change the STAB as it is not part of the regular mainentence.

Unforuntately, the color consistency, or lack of, is pretty much on par with what we experienced with our iGen3 as well. Lot of tweaking curves to get it to look like it did a day, week, month ago.

As for the magenta add, the magenta in the IGen3 does extend the gamut quite away from the standard offset magenta, so picking a gamut limiting CMYK profile should move or trim that magenta out.

Ok i have been running the Igen now for about 12 years and have the same prblem doing maint.

We have a TRC curve for jobs that look high in mag. Just set up a curve that has a minus 10 % .. That will fix that problem.. We don't run it alll the time. Just when there is a light background spot or on faces sometime. ( Light Blue sky ) This will take that out for you.


As far as doing the mant.. You shouldn't have to run your strip every day.. Maybe once a week or maybe less.. Everytime you do this , u might be throwing the machine off.

You should do the color check every am and run a 951.. This will put your machine back in specs and won't throw your color off as much.


Blue lines and mag lines.. AS soon as it happens run a LTR _CMM _batch run pages 1 thru 10 - this is located on your docusp under print from file -sample jobs.. Run it on 8.5 x 11 paper.. This will show you each wire mod and each color. It will show you what wire mod is acting up or even wich developer is being bad. It has all colr seperated and also all colrs combined.

This should help you. It also might be a PR belt issue.. check that also. Run the batch job 5 times to make sure it isn't skipping around.,.

Wow, 12 years. That's amazing. Considering the product was announced in 2001 and didn't ship till 2003.

I'm sure it just feels like 12 years.

Thanks Everyone for your help.
I will try these idea's.
Xerox is coming in on Monday to give me some idea's also.

If anyone else has anything to add, please do so.

Damian

I worked at Xerox in rochester Ny and was on the production of the machine. I was in it since the begining stages.. SO yes it has been about 12 years now. I worked on the docucolor 40 and was on the Product development team for the igen. I was the paper path guru...

I'm sure it just feels like 12 years. :)
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Good to know. I'm sure you have lots of stories then

Since you are the paper path guru, I have a question for you. Why did the paper path have to be on the floor? My knees are killing me from having to get down on them to clear that paper path. Was that the only option with the print tower?

Also, why can't those darn paper trays run empty?

Keeping the grids clean: If you clean off the bottoms of the wire mods, you shouldn't have to clean off the grids as often. You could always drop your toner concentration (or have your tech.) if it seems to be a certian color that does it more than others. Be aware that this could cause you to run lean on toner on images requiring heavy coverage of that color. The end result would be reload streaks.

STAB Blade: If you have one on hand this is NOT hard to replace for yourself. I think its a 10mm. Just do not take the IB screw all the way out and do not over-tighten it when replacing. DO NOT DROP A BIT OR SCREW! Xerox had a bad batch of blades recently. The mylar piece would strip out off the base prematurely.

RE: Troubleshooting with a letter size sheet: Just want to point out that you want to troubleshoot on whatever size you are running or greater. If you can, you should troubleshoot on the actual job stock.



PS - It's awesome this forum is picking up a tiny bit. Let's keep the info exchange flowing. I'm interested to test the color consistency of dc951 vs. calibration vs. dc951 AND calibration. Supposedly running a dc951 should be avoided because the process involves "a measurable amount of noise" which can actually throw off color accuracy more than help it. This is why the Color Check Tool was introduced. To allow customers to check the need for a dc951, and avoid running one when the don't need to.

mbrennan5, what DFE are you running? And what version of the press are you on?

I am running DocuSP 2.6 on all presses. IDK the patch level off the top of my head. We are notoriously late adopters with XRX software due be burned enough during beta tests. My analyst is weary of 3.0 after having rolled back one account already due to complications. I will report back in the coming weeks as I will be forced to 3.0 on a new DFE. Has anyone seen the "more windows like" GUI yet?

I've been running our Igen for a year now. We finally have our Igen running color great. We have set our Source profile to a profile created for you Karat 64 offset digital press, Then we created a custom profile right after we changed out our developer and belt so we had the best possible Destination profile we could get. From then on we just run a dc951 and change our toner purge for 1-4 in the NVM Read/Write to 90(color critical work) from 150(for non color critical work). This will make the system "adjust image quality" more often but will keep the color and quality. You would not have to have a special Source profile as we wanted to match our Karat. I have been told from someone at Xerox, to use GRACol_2006 Coated as a good all round Source porfile and then use the custom profile you made as the Destination profile. Hope this helps.

We "upgraded" to 3.0 about a month ago. Mega troubles in the begining. Was very unstable; we found using impossition feature. A software tech from Xerox disable the preview. I guess from my understanding that when we moved a file thru a que we used that had impossition features added it would rerip the file for the preview impossed. This bogged the system down and caused fatal errors. Once disable we can use the now thumbnail to preview the file to the size it was sent, but can't see a preview of the impossed file (was a new feature). We also have found that when using the background form feature it will falt out on some files, we think this may be font issues in the pdfs, just seemed odd that we use to be able to use them trouble free and now with 3.0 we can't really use that feature properly.
The GUI is pretty much the same. You can now arrange the Active, Paused, and Completed window in a few different configurations. There is an tool bar at the top that you can custimize with the features you use the most ex. Calabration, TRC's ect...

Honesty I would have stayed with 2.6 if I had knowed, but we have been able to get it working ok.

The GUI is a little nicer and customizable but the stability isn't worth the risk of complications. If you aren't having problems with 2.6 or being pressured to upgrade than I suggest waiting as long as possible.