By Erwin Busselot, Director, Ricoh Graphic Communications, Ricoh Europe
Ricoh Europe, London, December 1, 2023 – Professional colour management has historically been complex and required a significant investment in hardware, software, and staff.
However, there are three key reasons why this costly and time consuming approach may not continue to be the best way to address today’s print production demands:
1 Managing varied colour management requests
Print Service Providers (PSPs) are often asked to reproduce jobs. These can range from a long faded piece that the client doesn’t know where, when or what, it was printed on, to a returning client with a book from last year’s large run who plans to reprint 25 copies sporadically for their new customers. Both expect a result that matches in colour and quality. Quality colour management is key to delivering customer satisfaction. Traditionally, skilled colour management professionals will edit tone curves manually, and take a lot of time, to achieve a visually pleasing result. But it’s highly subjective and often futile because tone curve edits apply to all colours on all pages of the entire job.
2 Constraint free calibration
What if your press operators didn’t have to manually calibrate their machines multiple times a day? What if you no longer had to plan that downtime into your schedule, or organise and prioritise jobs based on when the press was last calibrated? PSPs can manually adjust the colour on the press itself, but this kind of intervention skews the look of the entire job. They can adjust the final file in editing software but it’s a trial and error process that wastes resources, blocks printing devices from producing sellable work, and takes time. The final judgement is entirely subjective. Operating free from those constraints could enable you to focus on client needs, increase throughput considerably and provide an edge in the competitive print market.
3 Eliminating the need for skilled staff
The skilled workforce in commercial printing is vanishing. A generation of experienced workers is retiring, leaving a print staffing gap. Training new staff is an option, but in such a competitive labour market, those expertly trained are more likely to move on. This is especially a problem in the print industry. And the more specialised the role, the greater the difficulty in solving this staffing crisis.
These complexities are simplified by the RICOH Auto Color Adjuster advanced colour management and colour matching solution. It enables PSPs of all sizes and types to meet the increasing demands of colour critical clients. It helps to significantly save time and cut costs, and to reduce the need for hard to find labour, drastically improving colour matching capabilities and results, and ensuring client satisfaction with:
- Precise colour matching that can identify and match colours from digital images, existing printed products, and both digital and offset printers.
- Device flexibility as colour produced by one machine can be reproduced regardless of system and is not limited or tied to a particular technology.
- Quick colour adjustment with the automated creation of ICC profiles to see consistent results. Colours are easily matched on multiple units by using profiles.
- The achievement of true, objective colour consistency across the entire raft of devices, including digital, offset, sheetfed, and wide format printers.
- Verified results with automated “go/no-go” judgements made entirely bias free. Subjective visual checks are replaced with industry standard colour verification.
- Unparalleled colour sample matching technology not offered by any other industry solution. With Ricoh or compatible printers, quick colour adjustment can rapidly create new output profiles using a barcode system.
Time taken to manually adjust press colour to meet print buyers’ demands can quickly impact profitability, while the costs of trial and error, blocking precious press time to troubleshoot and employing a colour expert all mount up.
RICOH Auto Color Adjuster eliminates practical limits on colour abilities, freeing up PSPs to go after any and all clients and job types, expand their client base and take on new jobs that were previously out of reach. Time is saved and waste reduced thanks to improved calibrations, and the elimination of manual steps.
Operations will also increase their objective confidence in their ability to match colour across devices, formats, and file types. They can finally take on those “impossible” jobs they’ve always tried to avoid.
