The
news came during a surprise departure from the planned schedule at the
Victorian and NSW PICAs. In Melbourne Ray Keen, President of Printing Industries in Victoria, took the stage to make the announcement, and the same
announcement was made simultaneously at the New South Wales Awards dinner.
Keen
said, "Australia has been at least three to four years behind the
international industry in this respect, a situation we could not allow to
continue. This new standard will provide clear, consistent standards for colour
management across the country and bring us up to international benchmarks."
A specialist body with members drawn from Printing Industries and the LIA is
to be set up in Australia,
to be linked to the Swiss based International Organisation for Standardisation
(ISO), for the development and implementation of ISO standards in the
Australian printing industry. Chairman will be Bob Lamont from the LIA,
with Robert Fuller at Printing Industries as deputy.
The committee has been granted observer status by the ISO. Its aim will be
to lead the implementation of the Australian standard – AS/ISO12647-2 – which
will be identical to the accepted international standard being developed
(ISO12647-2). Standards Australia
has already acknowledged the new committee as the industry's approved technical
body.
The drive to ISO in print is coming as a result of globalisation, with
multi-nationals demanding their brands have identical visual cues wherever they
are printed.
In a similar but unrelated move, the 3DAP committee (Digital Data Delivery
for Australian Publications) intend to release version 3 (V3) of their proof
guidelines early next year. Version 3 will adopt the international printing
standard ISO 12647-2 and intends to follow the proposed ISO 12647-7 tolerance
for proofing quality control, which at present is still in draft form.
3DAP Committee Chairman James Hawkes commented, "We can only agree with the
move by the LIA and Printing Industries to support printing to the ISO 12647-2
standard in Australia, and believe one of the many benefits will be a common
colour space for both web and sheet-fed print applications. This should narrow
the divide between the two printing methods and deliver a more consistent and
standardised colour outcome regardless of the type of printing press used."
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