Prepress

X-Rite and Pantone Unveil New Products and Demonstrate How to Achieve Consistent Color Everywhere, Fast at Print 09

Thursday 30. July 2009 - X-Rite, Incorporated (NASDAQ: XRIT), the world leader in color management, measurement and communication technologies, and its wholly owned subsidiary Pantone, the global authority on color and provider of professional color standards for the design industries, today announced plans for the upcoming Print 09 trade show (booth #6939, McCormick Place South, Chicago, IL, September 11-16 2009). The companies will unveil new products and demonstrate how latest X-Rite/Pantone line of design, prepress and print solutions can help customers achieve their color everywhere, fast.

During Print 09, X-Rite/Pantone will be demonstrating its full range of standards-compliant color management solutions for profiling and calibrating scanners, monitors, RIPs, printers and presses; press quality control tools for proofs, plates and prints; ink formulation tools; dedicated flexography and packaging solutions; and process control and color certification for the digital supply chain. A significant new product introduction will be announced on September 7, 2009.

Visitors to the X-Rite/Pantone booth will see how X-Rite/Pantone color solutions serve every stage of the print production value supply chain for commercial, on-demand and package printing, from concept to consumer, from inspiration to production. Together, X-Rite and Pantone offer an unmatched set of solutions designed to help users achieve their color, fast, consistently, and across all media. Throughout the show, X-Rite/Pantone will offer a custom ROI calculation service designed to help print shops of all sizes quickly calculate how quickly they could recoup their investment to help them chose the most appropriate product for their needs.

Show attendees will be able to see the recently announced IntelliTrax with Print Standardizer, the graphic industry’s first automated press quality control and standardization solution for dynamic dot gain compensation – featuring award-winning technologies from X-Rite and Alwan Color Expertise , a world leader in standardization and color management implementation. The combined offering establishes a new class of standardization solutions in the graphic arts industry and includes Alwan’s Print Standardizer software based on the company’s CMYK Optimizer engine and X-Rite’s IntelliTrax, the industry’s choice for automated press-side color control. Designed to address the graphic industry’s ever growing need for standards compliance, it provides an affordable and easy-to-implement standardization solution within the G7 workflow for analog and digital presses.

X-Rite will also be showcasing its new, streamlined high-end profile creation software portfolio featuring ProfileMaker 5 Platinum , ProfileMaker 5 Packaging and MonacoPROFILER Platinum . X-Rite’s new consolidated profiling software portfolio offers high-quality color output for any analog or digital printing technology, including inkjet, laser, offset and flexo printing. X-Rite’s profile creation solutions allow customers to build high-quality, reliable, custom ICC profiles tailored to their specific workflow needs.

X-Rite will demonstrate its ongoing commitment to international standards compliance for printing by showcasing ISO/G7 functionality embedded into its line of software solutions, as well as its portable, handheld spectrophotometers and its auto scanning systems. Print 09 will also mark the first North American showing of X-Rite’s new DensiEye 100 portable reflection densitometer.

Additionally, attendees will view a variety of essential PANTONE Color tools, including the PANTONE Goe System, coated and uncoated, PANTONE GoeBridge and PANTONE Color Bridge. With 2,058 colors, the Goe System offers a significantly expanded color palette, yet is based on only 10 ink mixing bases that are readily available anywhere in the world, ensuring color consistency while keeping ink inventory to a minimum for printers. The new bases deliver technically sound colors that are compatible with aqueous and UV coatings. Colors have been designed for printing uniform ink film thicknesses, which allows for equal drying times and more control when matching color on press. This enables press operators to run jobs at the same ink settings, providing significant production efficiencies.


Available in a portable, fan-guide format, GoeBridge lets users accurately visualize and evaluate how the more than 2,000 solid colors in the PANTONE Goe System will reproduce in CMYK on coated paper. The guide also provides CMYK, sRGB and HTML data for repurposing Goe colors in multiple color spaces.

Color Bridge, available in coated and uncoated stock, is another invaluable, multi-purpose tool that shows users how PANTONE MATCHING SYTEM Colors reproduce in CMYK in a side-by-side comparison. The guide also provides sRGB and HTML values for repurposing PANTONE Colors on monitors and Web pages.

Visitors to the X-Rite/Pantone theater will also be able to attend a series of presentations given by renowned industry professionals on current industry and technology issues that will include, among others, the following topics:

· “Defining and Managing Spot Colors through your Packaging Workflow,” presented by Jay Sperry, research associate at Clemson University’s Sonoco Institute of Packaging Design and Graphics

· “Industry first: dynamic dot gain calibration – close loop from press to Platesetter”, presented by David Hunter, owner of Pilot Marketing

· “FIRST 4.0: Process Control for Flexography,” presented by Bill Pope, technical director for the Flexographic Technical Association