Prepress
Colour control on press just got a lot easier
Thursday 24. January 2008 - ISO 12647-2 is the standard most print buyers in Europe specify. The majority of proofing devices are set up to match this standard, yet the percentage of printers capable of printing to ISO 12647-2 is still less than 25%. The new pressSIGN v 2 from Bodoni Systems makes it even easier to control press colour and hence the enable printers to meet ISO targets.
In a recent survey of UK printers, after price, the most important factor preventing printers adopting ISO 12647 was lack of knowledge. The survey showed that the majority expected the implementation of the ISO standard to be difficult because their staff didn’t understand it. While this maybe an indictment of the amount of staff training it shouldn’t stop printers meeting international standards.
pressSIGN is used by over two hundred printers around the world and now has additional features that make it even easier to monitor and control colour on presses.
All the printer has to do is follow the instructions and with 5 easy steps he’ll be meeting the printing standard he is aiming for.
pressSIGN works with the X-Rite Eye-One Pro spectrophotometer.
Add the pressSIGN control strip to a job.
read the control strip with the Eye-One and adjust the densities as recommended by pressSIGN
read the control strip when dry and update the dry back calculations
adjust the plate curve as recommended by pressSIGN
run the next job with the pressSIGN settings and you’ll have consistently accurate colour
pressSIGN version 2 adds new features.
pressSIGN v2 from Bodoni Systems makes it extremely easy for printers to control colour on the press and to generate the correct plate adjustment curves. For companies in the UK, Europe and the United States pressSIGN provides them with a means of quickly matching any of the international printing standards from ISO, GRACol or SWOP.
The new version of pressSIGN ensures that all measurements are now saved and can be exported and imported by other users. Every reading for a job is held in a job queue. These readings can be sorted based on any criteria and the results averaged. This gives a better reproduction and allows the user to set up two or more presses to run with the same set of plate curves.
Users can select any reading or a set of averaged readings and make this their new standard. This new reading becomes the OK sheet for the rest of the job. However, because the user has effectively captured the printing condition of the press he can keep this and use it to repeat the job exactly or even export these settings to another pressSIGN user. This feature is most useful when printing to non-ISO conditions and allows a level of consistency not available previously.
Users can also create their own standard in pressSIGN version 2 just by typing in their own target values.
pressSIGN allows for the automatic importation of dot gain adjustments into the most popular RIPs or directly into programs like Alwan CMYK Optimiser.