PacPrint, running from 28th June to 1st July at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre, will see an important new release from Colour Graphic Services, David Crowther’s specialist colour quality certification, training and technology supply company.
With the increasing demand for extended gamut colour reproduction across all disciplines – offset, digital, flexo, gravure and photography – the need for precise control of seven and eight colour ink sets becomes paramount. This is particularly true for labels and packaging, where colours such as orange, green and violet are added to the standard CMYK process colour combination. This is commonly referred to as ‘CMYK+X, or ‘extended gamut print.’As a result, Colour Graphic Services announces that it is now a local Australia-New Zealand dealer for CGS-ORIS.Established in 1985, CGS-ORIS (also known as CGS Publishing Technologies), is a global leader in colour management and was instrumental in enabling the change from expensive analogue-chemical proofing to low-cost digital using Epson wide format printers, which Crowther was also involved with in the early 2000s.
X GAMUT is a fully automated colour management software for extended gamut colour printing on digital and conventional presses. Spot and special colours can be accurately reproduced by using a standard fixed 7 or 8 colour ink set (CMYK+X). Often, orange, green, and violet are added to CMYK but other, such as Screen’s vibrant blue for its label presses, are possible.
One big advantage of CMYK+X one-pass printing is that there is no need for special colour ink mixes. This streamlines the production process considerably, since no press wash-up, changeover times or off-press mixing is necessary. This reduces ink inventory and waste from seldom-used tins of specially mixed inks. The nett result is that X Gamut helps to reduce costs for printers and clients alike – with clients able to claim greater environmental credentials and accurate, consistent special colours.
David Crowther comments: “At PacPrint and after, we will be focusing on Oris X Gamut, which brings numerous benefits to commercial, packaging and labels printers. With Oris X Gamut, spot/special colours can be accurately reproduced by using a standard colour ink set (CMYK+X), in seven or eight channels. The results are spectacular and we will be demonstrating this on our PacPrint stand F44 and welcome both digital and conventional printers to see and try for themselves.”
Why X Gamut?
Special colours are especially eye-catching and differentiate consumer appeal from plainer colours. However, until now, working with them requires effort and expense because of extra inventory, higher prices, frequent colour changes and subsequent wash-up and press downtime.
Oris X Gamut is not only ideally suited to reproduce spot and brand colours precisely, but also presents a perfect match of software features and intelligent workflow tools, enabling printers to leverage the full gamut of the press and ink set, so that images are printed brilliantly in all detail – without the need for special inks. This has also made X Gamut an important tool in the photographic/art printing industry where wide format printers always have extra colours to manage and workflows tend to be RGB.
Oris X Gamut’s key benefits are:
“We welcome all visitors to our small but powerful stand F44 at PacPrint,” says Crowther, “where we will also be showing colour measurement instruments from Techkon, Myiro and X-Rite, viewing booths from Just Normlicht, calibratable monitors from Eizo and demonstrating how Printflow CIP3 closed-loop colour and G7 & Mellow Colour ISO certification can ensure the right colours, first and every time.”
