A North Queensland printer has dramatically cut down on reprints and ink costs and is bringing in more business by getting the latest colour certification.
Peter Martin, owner of Lotsa Print in Port Douglas, says reprints are down 75 per cent and ink costs 15 per cent since he achieved the ISO 12647 certification in August, saving $25,000-30,000 during that time.
“This is the best thing we have done in the past five years,” he says. “We can print on anything and have excellent consistency of colour across all printers and media.”
Martin says he got his business certified after ‘baffling’ problems with colour consistency and accuracy were drawing complaints from clients.
He enlisted the help of David Crowther at Colour Graphic Services (CGS), who assessed the colour on several sample jobs by Lotsa and found significant issues and suggested getting ISO certified would fix them.
After four hard days at CGS and then colour fingerprinting Lotsa’s Ryobi 920 five-colour offset press and Fuji Xerox iGen4, the company passed the certification.
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Martin says it is too early to tell exactly how much more business is coming in, but sales are up on last year so far, clients are impressed and he is hoping to use the certification to attract government contracts.
“Staff and clients immediately saw a clear improvement in our output. Yes it was good before but now it was exceptional, skin tones, gradients, pictures and everything had that clarity and real life colour,” he says.
“We now print with great confidence – if a client queries the colour, we advise that we are certified and they accept that it is correct and their file has the wrong colour.
“We even found issues with the CTP that has now changed the way Agfa does service on their CTP units nationally, and had a competitor even comment to a supplier that our colour was bullet proof because we did the ISO.”
Martin says having the ISO certification makes a big difference because Lotsa is able to identify and correct problems before they affect print work.
“We no longer need to rely on press density settings or visual inspection to know if colour is correct – a quick 60-second scan and report tells us precisely where we are on colour accuracy, and staff can now do it every day and not rely on my assessments,” he says.
“We can see when the press or CTP is starting to wander and can take pro-active steps to correct it – before it would wander right off before we started getting complaints.
“Bloody printing machines move around a lot and you can do a lot of printing in a couple of weeks before someone notices, and all of it will have some level of error. As a small printer the savings really add up over time.”
Martin encourages printers to take advantage of a free colour check offered by CGS at PrintEx15 next month, which only eight printers have signed up to so far.
“We all believe as printers that our colour is top notch, yes we all notice it does wander at times but overall we are happy with it. That is just what we thought too,” Martin says.
Printers can bring in a few work samples and an ISO colour strip or test sheet printed on their machines to be checked against the standard and see if they have any problems.
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