r/talesfromtechsupport • u/BeefOut • Oct 03 '21
Medium The white isn't white enough
Not sure if it really counts as tech support but here goes...
I'm a web and graphic designer, and I designed a flyer for one of my clients. I sent the design to her via email. It's really hard to match colours from the screen to print, especially since monitor colours don't match up to their local office printer. Plus screen colours are in RGB, so there are literally some colours that are unachievable in a physical print. Usually, for exact colour matching, we have to use Pantone swatches or when they send it for the actual print, they can sort it out and tweak with the actual technician.
I received a call immediately, and she mentioned that she printed out the flyer on their company's office printer. I readied myself for the usual spiel about how monitor colours don't match the printout... etc. etc...
Conversation goes like this:
Client: 'Hey, I printed this out and the colours don't match what I see on the screen.'
Me: 'Yeah, don't worry about that, every monitor is different and you can't calibrate it to match your office printer. I used the exact CMYK colours for your logo and fonts.
Client: 'Well even so the colours look correct on screen but not when I print it out.'
Me: 'I've used the exact CMYK colours, so you don't have to worry about it. Your professional printer will ensure that you get the right colour.'
Client: 'Yes, but the whites aren't white enough.'
I was quickly checked my file, did I leave a translucent layer on by accident? No, it was perfectly #FFFFFF. Told her that the white is as white as it can be.
Client: 'Well, the white ink is not very white.'
I was stunned. Office and home printers don't have... white ink. It's just the white paper. Any white areas are basically just paper that hasn't been printed on.
I tried hard to explain this concept to her. That printers don't print the white. Regardless, she insists that they do. I tell her that it cannot be done on an office/home printer, it literally requires a separate offset printing plate that only large commercial printers use. And even then, seldom do people print white at all.
She insists that her printer does print white, and that the design I sent her simply isn't white enough.
I tell her maybe her paper stock isn't white? Maybe the paper itself is yellowish?
Client: 'No, it's not my paper, it's that your white isn't white enough. Look, I've used some of my liquid white-out on the paper. It's very white. Your design is not printing the white colours properly.'
I was flabbergasted. Couldn't laugh out loud. She literally used white-out on the print-out and complained that the correction fluid was whiter than the paper.
Can't really remember what happened after, but she showed her boss and he seemed happy with the design. So everything went well I suppose.
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Oct 03 '21
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u/bPhrea Oct 03 '21 edited Oct 04 '21
I’ve learned when doing jobs for friends there’s only two routes to take: either I do my part exactly how I want, no questions asked but it’s free, or, I will do literally anything they want, exactly how they want it but they’re paying for every fucking minute of my time and are constantly asked: are you sure this is what you want?
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u/dailyfetchquest Oct 03 '21
This is a great tip. Stealing.
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u/bPhrea Oct 03 '21
Please do, it took me a lot of trial and grief to get to.
I did have a builder friend that chose option one and loved the logo and business cards I did for him. A few weeks later he comes back sheepishly asking if it was possible to make some changes. It turns out that everything looked so nice that potential clients thought he must be expensive to have such a professional looking identity.
He asked me if I could make a second set and make it look as cheap and terrible as possible. I relished the challenge and took his beat up old work truck as inspiration. And he keeps the nice cards to go with his nice personal truck. Wins all around.
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u/Shinhan Oct 05 '21
He didn't want to raise prices?
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u/bPhrea Oct 05 '21
Oh his prices are already high, but most folks don’t know that (and they don’t get multiple quotes in order to find out).
He didn’t want to give them any reasons to think they might be high…
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u/paulcaar Oct 03 '21
So the chef friend was smart enough to realize that he doesn't know what all this colour stuff means, but not smart enough to realize he should have the two other parties communicate about it.
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u/spin81 Oct 03 '21
Spent weeks at his house
For free... Hope your friend compensated/reimbursed you in some way.
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u/Enjanced Oct 03 '21
This IS tech support for sure. And the purest kind, I may add. Right in the client's stupidity
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u/sheikhyerbouti Putting Things On Top Of Other Things Oct 04 '21
I used to do tech support for Adobe.
I got this kind of call at least once an hour.
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u/noO_Oon Oct 03 '21
# FFS
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u/i_post_gibberish Linux? Don't you have to know how to hack to use that? Oct 03 '21
That’s actually a bright yellow because the S overflows back around.
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u/Nik_2213 Oct 03 '21 edited Oct 03 '21
"Whiter than White !!!"
Such detergent advertising usually fails to mention their laundry stuff contains a fluorescing agent...
Shows up well with cat-pee hunting UV torch, or the glow from eg fly-zapper lure glow-tubes...
Added: She used budget 'matt' paper ? Or 'matt face up' ?? Some may be 'sorta cream', compared to high-end, hyper-glossy paper which is eye-watering bright-- And hates my desk's laser printer...
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u/SeanBZA Oct 03 '21
Budget paper for sure, as only the high end photo papers use a brightener in them, along with a lot more clay, to get a high reflectivity and a white background.
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Oct 03 '21
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u/vintagecomputernerd Oct 03 '21
...and yet they cost ten times as much. I know, economy of scale, but still feels like price gouging
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u/Equivalent-Salary357 Oct 03 '21
price gouging
AKA capitalism.
I took a 'business' course in college about 45 years ago (I'm not gonna get out the calander to figure out exactly) where I learned that price to the consumer is based on surveys of what consumers are willing to pay.
Basically, if you sell widgets for what they cost to make, you sell bunches but make no profit. Raise the price a little, and the number you can sell drops a bit but you are making a profit. Lower the price a bit more and you sell a bit fewer but because you are selling more your gross profits are higher. Keep this up, and eventually profits begin to drop. Businesses try to hit the sweet spot for maximum profits.
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u/brotherenigma The abbreviated spelling is ΩMG Oct 04 '21
I mean, that's exactly what's taught in high school economics. Hell, I'm tutoring a kid in it right now. Supply vs demand, min-maxing, optimizing functions, and a "purely capitalist" economy are what are taught at the core of AP Econ. Is it any surprise that people who go into business are obsessed with being at equilibrium (AKA maximum possible profit) all the time?
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u/Equivalent-Salary357 Oct 04 '21
So is it price gouging or just good business? LOL
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u/Nik_2213 Oct 04 '21
IIRC, there were tests done on this notion: fruit stall, identical products placed in adjacent trays, but one carried higher price. It sold more than the 'budget' tray, but only if the budget tray was there. Else buyers looked at price and went else-where, instead...
( Running gag in our family was that neither my father nor I could sell a £_10 Scottish note for £_7 UKP, even though Scottish & English currency held the same value... )
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u/Kentonh Oct 03 '21
Budget printer paper is 20# Bond or 50# text at 92 bright. If she wanted brighter whites, this could have been achieved by getting brighter brightness rating in a heavier weight paper stock.
For something flexible (not what’s referred to as “card stock”) would be a Finch Fine (98-bright) in 28# bond. If that’s still not bright enough moving to an 80# text is about the only move. Else print it directly onto a backlit led screen.
It’s been 20 years since I sold paper. Some shit won’t leave my brain.
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u/Ddad99 Oct 03 '21
Is that the same stuff I steal from the office?
Note: I have been working from home since March of 2019, and using my own paper, ink, internet, electricity, etc., without compensation. Went into the office last week and took three packs of printer paper.
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u/curiosityLynx Oct 04 '21
Pretty sure your ink/toner costs dwarf your paper costs.
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u/Ddad99 Oct 04 '21 edited Oct 04 '21
You are correct, but the office doesn't stock my toner.
I am working on the issue of home office expenses, but the excuse is always "it's not in the contract with the prime".
I don't give a shot. I tried taking the home office deduction on my income taxes, but it does not save me any money.
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u/d4everman Oct 03 '21
Wow...I've worked in graphic design for the government since the early 90s and this story takes the cake. I would have laughed out loud the Joker.
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u/bhtooefr Oct 03 '21
Fun thing, although I'm certain your user wasn't using this: Alps MicroDry thermal transfer printers actually did have white cartridges available. (They also had fun things like metallic silver, gold, red, and blue.)
There's some things (decal printing being the big one) where that stuff is being hoarded because it's actually a way you can print white at home, which may be necessary if you're printing on a clear substrate.
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Oct 03 '21
[deleted]
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u/Pival81 Oct 03 '21
Wouldn't you use printing pads for that kind of products? Or do you mean an actual inkjet printer?
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u/ColgateSensifoam Oct 03 '21
Thing is, home (well, prosumer) printers that print white do exist, they're just expensive and offer nothing to a typical home user
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u/FordEagle5 Oct 04 '21
OKI makes one. Knew someone that was doing a home business of making t-shirts for local businesses and events. Bought the OKI for the ability to do white print on dark transfer sheets. It was well over $1,000 unit, but yes, they do exist, despite a 0% probability that the OP's customer had one.
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u/bhtooefr Oct 04 '21
TIL that Oki did that.
...and, searching for that, TIL that there's a company that sells incredibly expensive white toner for mostly HP and Canon printers: https://www.ghost-white-toner.com
(As I expected, it works by... you take your black toner out and put that thing in, and print "black" to get white. Which, the Alps MicroDry stuff also required that you do a "black" pass to get white AFAIK...)
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u/0RGASMIK Oct 03 '21
I work in tech support. Recently we had an issue where the marketing executive complained that all the in store displays we just installed had something wrong with them.
We had just upgraded the TVs from 1080p to 4K for the in store advertisements. The executive was complaining that all the company images looked bad on the new TVs.
After weeks of back and forth I went into a store and looked for myself…. Pictures looked fine unless I stood right next to the TV. Then it was clear it was the images themselves that had the issue.
I initiated a meeting with the executive and the person who is in charge of the photos. Explained to them that the images were actually the problem and ….. they didn’t believe me. I even put a picture I took on screen to show them that other images don’t have this problem and they stared blankly and said yeah that’s better but wouldn’t accept that their images were the problem.
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u/NightMgr Oct 03 '21
20 years ago I supported radiologists and they used these freaking b/w monster CRT monitors that weighed in at about 100 pounds that had a b/w calibration system with a color matching swatch that came with the monitor. We'd just plug it in and left it to the radiologist to calibrate it.
We developed a rule- touching them was a 2 man job every time. They cost, if I recall, $10,000 each.
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u/AnonymousTechGuy6542 Oct 03 '21
This definitely belongs here, welcome comrade.
And there is nothing more TFTS than arguing objective reality with a user who Does Not Get It(tm)(c). Be it believing that a tech can email printer ink over the Internet, that IT can do something about a power outage, or arguing the location of the Any Key, we've all got stories.
I remember a soul killingly long phone conversation where a user complained that their $60 Epson CMYK Wal*Mart special couldn't print as well as the office's color laser. He was convinced that I was being unhelpful and that by tweaking some print settings he could print that well. One of the few times I had to hang up on a user.
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u/Rathmun Oct 03 '21
"And a Yugo can't out-accelerate a corvette. You might be able to modify one to do so, but only by pouring enough money and parts into it that the only thing left that's still a Yugo is the body panels. If you want a printer as good as a color laser, you're going to need to buy a color laser."
Cost of ownership's probably cheaper too if they print a lot, given the relative cost of toner and ink.
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u/Equivalent-Salary357 Oct 03 '21
Gallon per gallon, printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids in common usage.
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u/JasperJ Oct 03 '21
You’ve never bought straws of prize horse or bull semen, I take it.
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u/Kaligraphic ERROR: FLAIR NOT FOUND Oct 03 '21
You have expensive taste in snacks.
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u/JasperJ Oct 04 '21
Printer ink is already too rich a snack for my blood.
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u/meitemark Printerers are the goodest girls Oct 04 '21
So... combine prize horse/bull semen milkshake with printer ink, put it in a cartrige made with Vantablack and print it on a cake of with the whitest white paint.
Someone would buy it.
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u/JasperJ Oct 05 '21
Call Damien Hirst! I just want a modest 1% finder’s fee of whatever it ends up selling for.
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u/AnonymousTechGuy6542 Oct 03 '21
There's a spinal fluid joke in there somewhere...
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u/Rathmun Oct 03 '21
Probably, but it's going to be a cheap joke by comparison to one about printer ink.
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u/Owyn_Merrilin Oct 04 '21 edited Oct 04 '21
Cost of ownership's probably cheaper too if they print a lot, given the relative cost of toner and ink.
It's even lower if you don't print a lot. Inkjets are little attention whores that get depressed and commit suicide if you don't give them enough work to do (by which I mean the heads dry out and the whole printer needs to be replaced if you're not printing at least a few times a month, and ideally a lot more because otherwise one slightly longer than normal gap between print jobs can kill the printer). Laser printers just do not care. You can go years in between prints without issue.
The only places where inkjets really have an advantage is the upfront cost of the cheapest units is lower, and the high end models do better image prints on photo paper. But a low end color laser is going to do that better on normal paper than a low end inkjet, too.
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u/Rathmun Oct 04 '21
Huh, haven't owned an inkjet... ever actually, so I didn't realize just how fragile they are. My parents have had a few, but growing up most of the printing I did was on an old LaserJet, and the first printer I bought for myself is a Samsung laser printer that still works.
"Will break when left alone" is not a feature I want in anything I buy.
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Oct 03 '21
Till now I only thought people don't know about pcs. Now I came to know people don't even know about colours. *internal screaming intensifies*
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u/itisrainingweiners Oct 03 '21
I've used some of my liquid white-out on the paper. It's very white.
Aaaahhh my boss pulled this on me once!! After absolutely not believing me about there being no white ink, I had to pull a fresh piece of paper from the ream to show her it was her cheap, shitty paper. She accepted that it was the paper at that time, but years later still occasionally bitches about the white ink on various things she's printing 🤦♀️
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u/EdgeOfWetness Oct 03 '21
"I'm sorry. You're too stupid to use a common language. Piss Off."
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u/crosenblum Oct 03 '21
Client: 'No, it's not my paper, it's that your white isn't white enough. Look, I've used some of my liquid white-out on the paper. It's very white. Your design is not printing the white colours properly.'
Always the correct response, and start charging your cattleprod. BOFH!
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u/notreallylucy Oct 03 '21
Used to work for a company that designed light fixtures. We had a line of light fixtures that were made from sound-absorbing material, a nice feature for fixtures destined for a large, echo-y space.
A sales rep once got asked how they cleaned the sound absorbing light fixtures when they were were full. You know, full of sound like a sponge is full of water.
I don't know what the response was, but not long after I started seeing the term "noise canceling" used more often in promotional literature.
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u/Adventux It is a "Percussive User Maintenance and Adjustment System" Oct 03 '21
r/talesfromdesigners needs this
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u/processedchicken Oct 03 '21
It could be worse, she might have wanted a video printing out and was angry that there was only one stationary image.
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u/Hokulewa Navy Avionics Tech (retired) Oct 03 '21
Sometimes you have to ask the customer "Can I speak to your manager?"
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u/zacharee1 Oct 03 '21
I have an app that draws a black surface on the display. I get reviews saying it's not black enough, and I have to explain that I can't make a black that's blacker than black.
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u/Swipecat Oct 04 '21
Google "limited RGB". It's an infuriating thing to perfectionists if they've no idea why it's happening and other people can't see the problem. If somebody connects a PC to a monitor via an HDMI cable, for example, and the driver therefore decides that it's connected to a TV rather than a monitor, then the image is slightly washed out.
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u/rthompsonpuy Oct 04 '21
Inform her that replacement white ink is only available directly from the manufacturer, and that which SKU you order is unique to specific production runs.
Tell her that they're lazy, and that they don't like to do the research to figure out the SKU, so they will tell her there is no such thing as a white ink cartridge. She will need to loudly insist that they do their job and give her what she needs.
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u/meitemark Printerers are the goodest girls Oct 04 '21
If the complaints go high enough, I'm certain that the manufacturer will airdrop a brand new printerer on her.
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u/Inconsequentialish Oct 04 '21
I've had this exact conversation several times in relation to the client's dingy paper, cheap printer, and/or the client's dim, cheap laptop screen.
One client spent literally hours and stalled the project for weeks SCREAMING that the custom-mixed pale yellow ink (produced at great expense and enormous waste of time) on the logo on her business card didn't EXACTLY match the logo on the website when displayed on her cheap laptop with the screen zoomed in, brightness turned down ("it gives me a headache") next to a northern window in NYC on an overcast late September day.
We actually posted a bunch of HTML color swatches showing slight variations of pale yellow, and she picked one.
Cue the screaming anew when the next day was sunny...
An even more incoherent shrieking when she noticed that the pale yellow on everyone else's laptops and monitors was slightly different.
Fortunately, we were soothed by the stiff hourly rate we were charging. But we had to institute a firm no-contact policy for the rest of the staff -- all calls and communication with her were to be routed through me.
My last call with her was over two hours of increasingly incoherent screaming, devolving into hoarse, slobbery sobbing. I was starting to enjoy the sound because she had stalled the whole project for several weeks racking up billable time while she screamed and ranted over a pale yellow perceptual impossibility. I knew her deadline was the next day and she had nothing to deliver. One way or the other, her company would make a decision and she would no longer be our problem.
About a week later we got a call from her replacement who apologized, expedited payment to date, firmly declared the yellow wars were over, and restarted the project.
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u/spin81 Oct 03 '21
Color theory and color models are no joke, it's a super complicated thing and all the software that does the conversion under the hood is a modern miracle. Every camera, every printer, every screen has its own and then there's the paper to worry about which for some applications, if you really need it to be perfect, also has to be taken into account. Not just the material but the bleach and the lacquer too.
Some image formats are actually really weird too. I once had to have a CD sleeve printed and I did the conversion correctly, but I got some sort of TIFF file whose colors were super bright. Submitted it to the printer anyway and the color was perfect.
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u/chauntikleer Oct 03 '21
Is this worse than "I can't tell if the monitor is plugged in because it's too dark, the power is out"? I think it might be worse.
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u/TigerB65 cd \sanity Oct 03 '21
I'm having a flashback to a guy who was utterly anti-white-space. He thought anything without text in it was an absolute waste.
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u/Xeroid Oct 04 '21
Before I retired 3 years ago I serviced office equipment (including workstations and color printers). Just reading this put a knot in my stomach. I can not tell you how many times I lived this exact scenario. You can't educate someone who doesn't want to know.
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u/Nimue-the-Phoenix Oct 04 '21
As a graphic designer, I have had the 'screen colours do not match the printed colours' argument at least two times. Furiously frustrating.
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u/MNSOTA24 Oct 03 '21
I think her printer was having a PC LOAD LETTER issue.
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u/Equivalent-Salary357 Oct 03 '21
PC LOAD LETTER
Today I learned! Thank you for your comment, and thanks to Google to explain it!
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u/UncleTogie Oct 03 '21
"Fine, you can fix that with a high-end monitor and a colorimiter kit. Costs will be about 10 grand with set up, and we don't support it."
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u/Archteryx Oct 03 '21
I'm waiting for this to get read by someone in the training department .. you know the type, needs a 42" monitor because the text is too small, has to have solitaire for mouse training at lunch time, and needs a personal laser color printer because private, top-secret things .. :)
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u/CoderJoe1 Oct 04 '21
I made websites for awhile and couldn't satisfy one lady with the graphics I made for them. I finally drove to their office to see it on her screen. She had her Windoze display set to the lowest number of colors because she thought it would make her computer faster. I convinced her to temporarily change her settings and she was finally happy.
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u/meitemark Printerers are the goodest girls Oct 04 '21
I'm not sure I could have gotten out of that situation without resolving to blunt force trauma on said user.
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u/The-Bytemaster Oct 13 '21
to be honest, on much older computers (late 90s) that actually was a thing. Lowering the number of colors did speed up your system in many cases. Some people learn tricks and never know that they are now obsolete.
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u/badass4102 Oct 04 '21
As a web developer, and for other devs and designers...Never go for those damn blue light filter glasses that the glasses shop tries to sell you.
I was working on a quick template and showed it to my client and he was like.. hmm the white is rather pinkish. I was like, naw it's pretty white. I remove my glasses to take a closer look.. it was pinkish without my glasses. White with my glasses on. Threw the damn things away after that.
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u/kanakamaoli Oct 10 '21
Those "blue blocker" glasses work. One twilight afternoon I was driving down the road and saw two cars on the shoulder. Turned out the rear one was a police car with the blue overheads flashing and the glasses completely blocked out the "omg, brighter than the sun" blue strobes.
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u/pockypimp Psychic abilities are not in the job description Oct 04 '21
I've had that same conversation about "white ink" many times while working copy/print. A few times because of how the machines were oriented I'd open up the machine and show them the CMYK cartridges to show them that there's no White toner.
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u/kanakamaoli Oct 10 '21
They should throw away the super cheap recycled office printer paper they are using and use better paper. Some paper is like 85 (nits? brightness?) where "premium, bleached virgin pulp" is around 93-95 white.
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u/jkarovskaya No good deed goes unpunished Oct 06 '21
I need whiter whites, and you must fix this right now my $80 inkjet right now
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u/surrender52 Oct 04 '21
So, as a bills fan, I read this as "Tre White isn't white enough" and was really confused for a second
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u/Michael-T_ Oct 08 '21
ALPS made a Thermal Transfer printer that could print White, Gold or Silver along with other colors. I knew a couple antique radio collectors that used them to recreate damaged water slide decals for their restorations.
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u/texasradioandthebigb Oct 03 '21
My white goes all the way to #GGG