The core system is its new IP3 miniature colour test form, which is small enough to fit alongside, or instead of, the colour bars in a normal commercial job. "The need to run tests has really held the ICC colour management process back in the past. Running test jobs is not a printer''s favourite activity," said an X-Rite spokesman. "IP3 lets them run as part of their normal production, so they can still make money from the run."
New auto-tracking and micro-spot spectrophotometry are accurate enough to pick up information from very small colour patches. X-Rite has developed a characterisation target formatted as a small colour bar in one or multiple tiers.
Its colour bar has a patch size of 3.85x3.85mm . X-Rite said that "a 2,040mm paper width [B1 ]can accommodate 266 discreet colour patches in a single tier, enough to encompass the entire IT8/7.3 basic data set (186 patches). Likewise, the extended IT8/7.3 data set (928 patches) can be accommodated within a four-tiered colour bar." It sees the use of IP3 in particular for updating or tweaking profiles which have already been created for the press.
Complementing IP3 is the new on-press Auto Tracking Spectrophotometer (ATS). New SpeedProfiler 2 software takes the readings from the ATS and generates ICC profiles. Komori is the first to adopt IP3 targets with its new PDCS on-press system, which incorporates ATS, shown for the first time at Drupa.
Lower down the scale is QuickCal, a small hand-held densitometer which can read the miniature test bars by running it over them like a computer mouse. This is primarily aimed at digital printers and colour copiers, allowing them to calibrate their systems through ICC output profiles. The device can be programmed for different output/Rip combinations by running it over pre-printed bar codes - initially some 25 devices are supported. Density measurements are said to be accurate to within 2%, and QuickCal also calculates and reports dot area. QuickCal is backwards-compatible with X-Rites DTP32 AutoScan Densitometer and will ship "sometime after Drupa."
X-Rite has introduced other new colour products at Drupa. On-Screen Colour is a software utility that allows solid and specially mixed colours to be previewed on screen as a simulation of the printed result via ICC profiles.
ColorMail is software which translates colour description information from X-Rite's measuring devices into a form which can be e-mailed as part of a job description or specification. Users drag and drop colour samples from the enabled software to the Windows desktop. The resulting file can be attached to an e-mail. ColorMail works with all popular e-mail programs that support file attachments.
Another new measuring device is the X-Rite 520, an entry-level densitometer and colorimeter for press console comparisons of proofs with pulls, that reads out LAB values.
By Simon Eccles
