Affordable Printing Colour Drift System

According to Tectonic International, if there is one piece of equipment that is sure to provide an immediate return on investment, it is a print inspection system.

According to Tectonic International, if there is one piece of equipment that is sure to provide an immediate return on investment, it is a print inspection system.

However, the company believes that until now there has been a gap in the market between the basic video web inspection systems and the mid range active area scan inspection systems.

The latter monitor colour and detect defects 100 per cent in the area a camera is looking at before moving on to the next viewing area and verifying bar and pharmaceutical codes.

Above all, in the company's opinion, a print inspection system is a quality control tool that should provide the operator with perfect picture quality and features that will make it substantially easier for him to produce the highest quality print, with as little waste as possible and with the minimum of setting up and downtime.

To date, the two technologies used in the manufacture of active inspection systems are line-scan, which should provide true 100 per cent print error detection and area-scan, which it is said allows the detection of errors on part of the web.

Both technologies and the systems they produce are useful but prohibitively expensive for many printing companies under strong pressure to achieve a more predictable result and ensure the colour output is maintained on-line, through the run and matches the brand image, said Tectonic.

Tectonic International has used TI DSP image processing technology in the development of what the company claimed is the printing industry's first, low-cost, high resolution, active inspection system - K2colour.

Using the colour monitoring algorithms based on the industry standard CIE Lab colour space model developed for Tectonics' Jaguar print inspection system.

Tectonic said that K2colour is a simple to use system capable of monitoring and displaying the colour stability of the print process.

For little more than the cost of many entry level systems the active K2colour checks for colour drift within the operator's pre-set tolerances and provides an alarm as soon as the colour starts to drift, so that adjustment can be made before colour drift is apparent to the human eye.

As well as colour monitoring, K2colour provides job store and wireless or networked image transfer so that nominated personnel can check the print quality from any installed K2 by 'grabbing' live images from their personal PC inside the factory.

When received by the PC the date and time of transfer is shown on the image along with other useful information and the 'live' image can be stored, shared with others for discussion or emailed to a customer as a proof.

Data can be tailored to suit our customer's requirement, added Tectonic.

Back to top