Why that number of colour patches?

Question

I am a production manager at a large format printing company. I am specially concerned about color calibration of the printers. In that sense I would like to know how do you calculate the amount of colour patches to print and to correctly calibrate the way the printers reproduce the colours? How many colour patches are typically needed and why that number of patches? Is it a statistical calculation?

Best regards,
Paul John Vicente.

Answer 1

The color patches help your printer correctly identify colors when a test page was printed. Basing on the numbers of the page and after you enter them, the printer will correctly print the correct color. This is needed for calibration and it needs to be done when cartridges are changed. For each color, there is a number stored in memory so for the printer to correctly print all the colors, those numbers need to be updated regularly. You can do this from the printer's OSD menu.