The company first viewed the system at IPEX 2006 and signed an agreement with Mellow Colour in April this year, giving CPI the right to supply the system for three years in the Aisa-Pacific region.
“We wanted to give our customers complete satisfaction in regards to their printing needs by increasing down-time of their operation and increasing the quality of their printed products,” says managing director of CPI, David Bull.
Unlike many quality control systems, the Print Spec monitor’s the integrity of the printed product during the on-press process rather than the pre-press process. It includes software designed to measure different print quality aspects of substrate, ink and colour combinations and can be configured to compare a product’s colour to a benchmark – for instance, ISO12647-2 or in-house colour standard.
Print Spec includes a 24 patch control strip, eps file for easy insertion into a customer’s workflow, and provides ongoing measurement and analysis allowing the evaluation of CtP TVI compensation curves, grey balance, and even colour densities in the final product.
Using a Gretag Macbeth Eye-One Spectrophotometer, or X-Rite 530 Spectrophotometer, depending on the customer’s choice, the system scans the printed region monitoring target gradation, ink colour, trapping, and dot gain numbers providing onscreen feedback or a printed report indicating the areas needed for fine tuning and reducing errors.
According to David Bull the Print Spec system is a powerful tool for offset printers, wanting to ensure that colour integrity is maintained in their customer’s products.
“This system can compare colour samples to a standard or a company standard and can even compare the colours in different samples,” he says
“Say you have a client that is coming for a product check, and you need to make sure that the printed product is exactly like the proof. This system will analyse the colour of a printed product and tell you that the problem is, for instance, with the magenta deck of the press, saving you a heap of time in fixing the problem at its source,” says Bull.
Bull says the Print Spec acts as a factory troubleshooting device, giving the printer proof to print colour fidelity and consistent colour appearance from job-to-job, month-to-month and even factory to factory because it compares the colour of different product samples.
“The beauty of this product is that you can have integrity in the printing of products at different times and also at different printing locations,” he says.
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