Online Labels Forum

I'm sorry to hear about the color quality issues you're experiencing, and I want to help in any way I can. Our Weatherproof Gloss Inkjet (WJ) material differs from paper-based labels and standard copy paper. It's made of a durable plastic film, so it behaves differently than printable paper products. In most cases, adjusting the printer's paper/media type setting, as you mentioned, will resolve this.

I found the Epson XP-15000 user guide and reviewed some of their suggested troubleshooting. For faint or uneven printing, the manual suggests running a nozzle check and cleaning the print head if needed. It is also recommended that the ink cartridges be checked, as old or low ink can cause similar results. However, I understand that the output of the blue ink doesn't seem to be affected on other papers. Can you confirm if these are comparable to our film-based Weatherproof Gloss Inkjet? If they are paper-based or have other variances, you may want to try some additional paper type settings. The Epson XP-15000 should also offer other glossy paper types as well as presentation paper settings.

I hope this information helps. If you need additional sample sheets for testing, just let me know.

Edited by user Thursday, June 6, 2024 1:19:05 PM(EST)  | Reason: Not specified

Epson lists a variety of photo papers and presentation papers as the supported media. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to locate polyester or vinyl listed as supported materials so it may take some trial and error to get the correct paper type and color profile for your designs.

In the meantime, we're happy to help provide the additional sheets while you troubleshoot the issue, so I'll have those mailed out to you today.

Hey I wanted to update this with my findings in case any other desperate soul comes is having the same issue and stumbles onto this thread. First off, a special THANK YOU to online labels for sending those extra sheets, it was really helpful for me to figure this out. The problem wasn’t the printer, the paper, my computer or even print settings- its some kind of compatibility issue between Ventura (and more recently Sonoma which seems to have similar issues) and Silhouette Studios program I’m using to design/cut my stickers and my new epson. It wasn’t the printer or the paper, bc it prints beautifully out of Inkscape and other programs on the same macbook (there were days of testing various print settings, programs, and whatnot, but I’m condensing it a bit). I imagine this is only affecting a small portion of users, but it’s a pretty significant error- the colors print at only 50% vibrancy of what it should (I know this bc I accidentally printed a swatch twice while testing and got the correct color lol)

Awhile back I had heard that SS didn’t gel well with the newer macOS like Ventura, this is the first problem I’ve come up against. Unfortunately this means it’s not an easy fix- but there are work arounds…
1. if you have the option to use the Mac Time Machine to go back to the previous macOS, from what other mac/epson owners in my Silhouette fb group have said they don’t have these issues with that. But my MacBook was new, and came with Ventura (fun fact, you can’t revert to an earlier version of macOS that came with your MacBook)
2. I’ve been designing on my MacBook and printing the files off an old windows laptop I have. The best results I got with windows laptop is on: Photo glossy/High quality/Epson controls- Adobe RGB.
3. You could try to figure out a work around on how to print the stickers from another program (like Inkscape), but that’s going to be complicated bc of the registration marks have to be exact. When I tried to do this though,I found that I had to manually adjust the cuts bc the registration marks weren’t printing correctly . I also tried print to preview and print to pdf, and neither really solved this for me…it’s worth trying though in case you get different results.

If you have Silhouette Studio, Ventura and an epson, you can still sort of print on other types of sticker paper ok, but none of those prints have even come close to the vibrancy I’ve gotten off of that old geriatric windows laptop lol. It’s not perfect, but my XP 15000 prints such GORGEOUS color compared to the old HP photo envy I had that I still don’t regret buying it even with the added step.

**If you have an HP printer and a mac, and are having a similar problem printing out of Silhouette studio, I had one before the epson, and found when I switched from the AirPrint driver to the epson driver (that you download from their website) it weirdly lightened the stuff I was printing out of Silhouette Studio. So my first suggestion would be to make sure you’re using the AirPrint driver… yes you heard me correctly. I know the AirPrint driver isn’t supposed to be as good for professional printing, but some oddities that Silhouette I think are more compatible. I did get slightly better results when I did the same with epson, but not enough to suit me.


Silhouette recently went through a website migration (totally unrelated to the software or my problem) but they’re focusing on damage control at the moment, but after things calm down a bit, I’ll send them my testing data so they can hopefully find a solution in the future. I hope this helps someone else.