Curve4: Now with Maxwell!

Guess what new feature is being added to Curve4?

Long-term color tracking and trending for your entire print organization!

Guess how much that will cost?  

No additional charge for any Curve4 customer!

Bonus question:  How hard will it be to implement?

Two easy setup items in Maxwell and two easy setup items in the new Curve4.

Steve Upton explains the details in this new video.

Color Management all the more important when having supply issues

It's no secret that many in the print industry are having problems getting and maintaining stocks of substrate material. Recent surveys show that the industry expects the situation to get worse in coming months. If this hasn't happened to you yet, it probably will! When you have different substrates being pulled from irregular sources, this is a good recipe for color inconsistency and other headaches. This is fair warning to bone up on your profile building. Modern profiling systems do an excellent job of creating profiles that make the most of your print / media /ink gamut. You might be able to profile an inferior grade of paper to look similarly to your regular paper.

What even more important, a good modern profile will accurately portray your color workflow. When it comes time to make one printer look like another printer, that's when you need particularly accurate profiles to pull this off.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention as well that a system of tracking color consistency over time is a life-safer in these unsettled times. We have had Maxwell customers who have successfully kept their supplier's feet to the fire as it were, as Maxwell provided proof that the purchased paper showed a change in quality. Contact us for information about an easy and inexpensive way to start tracking your color, and get started now - before things get busy and before trouble comes.

G7: How a big company does it

Our friend Jeff Collins,
and another friend, Mike Todryk, of IWCO Direct have a great discussion on how Mike was able to take a company with an enormous variety of printing devices & technologies, and transform it so that they know where their color is, they have their color under control, and they maintain a "shared neutral appearance" - through the wonder of G7.  Mike shares details about the software they used, and what they did to improve procedures for saving time, money and hitting industry standard color.   A special bonus near the end includes the mistakes that brand owners commonly make when communicate color to printers.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/episodes/iwco-direct-the-benchmark-of-a-process-control-culture

24. IWCO Direct: The Benchmark of a Process Control Culture Mike Todryk elegantly walks through what anyone would describe as THE absolute benchmark process control company - across (3) facilities, (13) Continuous Web Litho Presses, (10) Continuous Web Inkjet Presses, (10) Flexo Presses, (3) Digital EP Presses, (2) Sheetfed Offset Presses, (3) Contract Proofers - maintained by (4) in-house G7® Experts.

Color Management in the Cloud

Steve Upton is interviewed by Cary Sherburne of What They Think on how Maxwell is being used to monitor color within companies and around the world.  He describes how Shutterfly is using the Maxwell solution in photobook printing.

How can you describe all that Maxwell can do in only 3 minutes!?

http://whattheythink.com/video/84193-blending-cloud-services-color-management-increased-efficiency/

Curve3 is here!

Curve3 is out! Curve3 is the latest version of the calibration software that simplifies the IDEAlliance G7 calibration method for linearizing printing presses and other printers. While we talked about Curve3 in our December newsletter, we came up with so many more features to add that it took longer to finally get it all ready. We think it will prove to be worth the wait!

This new version has advanced smoothing algorithms when inputting data, the ability to linearize special inks besides CMYK, the ability to use the printer's native black as the aim point (useful for some inkjets), the ability to begin with custom values in the initial calibration (making for improved results), improvements to VPR (the Virtual Press Run) module, and a lot of additional analysis and diagnosis functions.  Click here for more details on our website.   Click here for a newsletter article describing the new features.

X-Rite discontinues devices

End of these devices

X-Rite discontinues instruments

Now that the eXact has been released, X-Rite has stopped selling many of their handheld measurement instruments.  In an effort to streamline their products, they are discontinuing many older measurement devices. The new eXact is replacing some of these and some legacy devices will have trade-in value for upgrades.

Already discontinued as of March 30, 2013:
518, 528, DensiEye 700 (most models), SpectroEye LT.

Discontinued June 30, 2013 will be:  530, 530+IntelliTrax bundles, 939, 939M, SpectroEye, SpectroEye+IntelliTrax bundles. X-Rite will continue to provide support and service for 7 years after the discontinuation date.  Here is the link to X-Rite's partial list of discontinued products:

http://www.xrite.com/top_support.aspx?action=discontinued