Admiralty Chart Colours

[ctva]

Has anyone recently bought printed Admiralty charts lately?

Reason I ask is that I have just received one from Book Harbour of the West Coast and the yellow land is like a very faded chart would be, far less vibrant than old charts that I have. It is newly printed.

Thanks

 

[jwilson]

Charts are now mostly printed locally at the chart agent rather than getting a "factory" mass printed one with up to date manual corrections as you used to. Up to date corrections now all on the file they get printed from. Maybe your chart agent's printer was low on ink or using cheap ink?

 

[jdc]

One fairly recent change is that there is now an international standard for chart colours, and it's similar but not exactly the same as the ones the UKHO used to use.

I don't find it as attractive; the yellow is less mustard / ochre and so looks more wishy-washy. But it's probably only a matter of taste. More significant I feel is the apparently poorer quality paper of print-on-demand charts from Kelvin-Hughes, aka Bookharbour.

UPDATE: After some digging into it I think the standard I referred to is known as S-52 which is for ECDIS, ie electronic, charts. But the IHO says that the standard S-52 'Bright Day' palette should be used for printed versions. As ever with standards, finding the data is nigh impossible, but it seems that v4.0 of the IHO 'presentation library' defines colour LANDA for land as (r,g,b) = (222,205,139), which is actually quite a brown yellow. So now I'm confused! Land on my recent chart from Bookharbour is certainly not this colour.

 

[MM5AHO]

Another upcoming change is the ceasing of producing the Leisure folio sets of charts.
Fortunately others are stepping into the gap left by Admiralty in that respect.

 

[Deleted member 36384]

I replaced my portfolio about 2 years ago and many were printed on demand by Bookharbour. The yellow is lighter than the ones they replaced but it is not something that concerns me. From memory, the charts have a QAQC bit that demonstrated that the chart colours have all been printed.

 

[dunedin]

Another upcoming change is the ceasing of producing the Leisure folio sets of charts.
Fortunately others are stepping into the gap left by Admiralty in that respect.

Surely the UKHO proposal to cease production of Small Craft Folios is still just that - a proposal which has recently been put out for consultation feedback. Yes they may just ignore the responses from RIN, RYA, CA and others - but not quite a fair acompli yet.

So who do you see stepping into the gap left if UKHO Small Craft Folios cease? Imray folios currently have much less coverage of U.K. waters.

PS.Currently I use Admiralty charts as much prefer the readability, including colours, compared to Imray