InkOptimizer improves colour ink efficiency

Paragon Press, a commercial printer in Salt Lake City (USA) has installed GMG's InkOptimizer and is achieving more consistent grey balance, faster make-readies, less waste and savings on ink costs.

When Paragon was looking to upgrade its colour management capabilities, it had been frustrated by persistent problems related to managing and maintaining grey balance.

When it ran a neutral three-colour grey next to black-only boxes on a press, it had a warm tint in the mid-tones, a green tint in the 3/4 tones, and pink highlights.

Paragon desired a grey balance throughout the range, to improve quality and consistency.

Pre-press manager Chris Hamilton says: 'Before we installed GMG InkOptimizer and GMG ColorServer, I used to manipulate individual plate curves using manual readings and calculations to get a good result, and our scanner operators were still complaining about the grey balance on press.

GMG InkOptimizer, popular with large printers, automatically reduces the amount of chromatic colours, promising significant ink savings on the press, while maintaining quality and improving printing conditions.

Even though images remain identical - both to the eye and spectrophotometrically, the amount of colour ink used is significantly reduced.

Hamilton adds: 'As many as 20-30 jobs every six months would typically have an offset problem due to excess water or extremely heavy ink coverage on the press.

With GMG InkOptimizer, that problem has almost disappeared.

Press make-ready is faster and waste is reduced.

Drying times and run performance are also improved, often allowing faster press speeds.

The software can be quickly and reliably incorporated into automated workflows with multiple 'hot folders' providing individual colour transformation settings.

GMG InkOptimizer supports the full range of industry-standard data formats, and can handle PDF files directly without interpreting them, preserving data integrity and making format conversions unnecessary.

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