Outside printing company blues

[Cadfused]

I'm working on an issue where-as for a small job or for a couple sets of Architectural drawings, we will print in-house and the prints come out looking great. An ongoing issue we have had is with the prints that come from our outsourced print company. Though we send them the same pdf or plt file that we print in-house, there are certain color numbers that their system prints totally wrong and we lose that consistency and shading. there are about 5 specific colors (at this point) that i know are issues to our outsourced company's system. I could go through and change those specific line colors to different colors that may print identical but i would have to create 256 lines and make them all 256 ctb colors and print in-house and through the our printing company and by then, i would be ready to use the out-house. (sorry, bad humor there).
The printing company uses their program to tone back the line types to bring out the shading and that works to some extent but you lose the crispness of some of the lines that way and there are some, such as brick or cmu lines in building elevations that just come out looking worse than before.
The person at the printing company felt it is an issue with us using a shareware pdf creator and not using the authentic adobe program to create our pdf's. Our in-house IT person begs to differ and says there was a magazine article trumping that theory. Another thought the person had was that we were using old drivers but our IT person says we are using newer drivers than what the person said we would need. This also doesn't explain why our PLT files print the same way. Items that should come out gray or shaded come out totally black or very dark. it is as if the print company's system strips out the shadings that are encoded in the plt or pdf's we create in-house. I'm charged with trying to find a solution so that when we send our pdf's or plots to this company, the prints come out pretty well identical to what we print in-house.
have any of you run into this issue and been able to fix it or might have some ideas that i have not been able to come up with. Thank you.

[CADken]

this isn't a huge help, but... have you tried to use another print company? I would try to find at least 2 more companies to try to plot through. Compare the pricing the quality of the prints.... is there a specific reason you are using this out-house company? (sharing bad humor :D )

I am in charge of our printing as well, most of which is done in-house and sometimes our PDFs plot in black and white only, no shading variations whereas our actual dwg files plot of crystal clear.

**ON AN UNRELATED NOTE: IT people are bullheaded, I avoid ours, he reminds me of the SNL skit with Jimmy Fallon as the IT guy.**

[Cadfused]

this isn't a huge help, but... have you tried to use another print company? I would try to find at least 2 more companies to try to plot through. Compare the pricing the quality of the prints.... is there a specific reason you are using this out-house company? (sharing bad humor :D )

I am in charge of our printing as well, most of which is done in-house and sometimes our PDFs plot in black and white only, no shading variations whereas our actual dwg files plot of crystal clear.

**ON AN UNRELATED NOTE: IT people are bullheaded, I avoid ours, he reminds me of the SNL skit with Jimmy Fallon as the IT guy.**
L.O.L. (over the IT comment).
The possibility of trying another print company is being talked about if things can't be addressed through our current Out-house printing company. We are trying to exhaust all possibilities first, in hopes we can continue to do business with them.
I appreciate the feedback to this thread. thanks.:lol: