“Our focus on the quality market means we place a particularly high value on color management. Prinect Image Control is an important building block in our color workflow, since it measures the entire print image, in other words what we are actually selling,” says Uwe Schade, Managing Director at Rasch, explaining the company’s investment decision.
“1,000 Prinect Image Control systems installed worldwide is compelling evidence of the importance that the quality-oriented high-end sector attaches to spectrophotometric color measurement. Many print shops recognize that investments in an optimized color workflow really do pay dividends, since quality can be produced and reproduced with absolute reliability,” explains Jörg Bauer, Vice President of Prinect Product Management at Heidelberg.
Prinect Image Control is a highly automated color measuring system for monitoring quality outside of the press. It is the only system in the world to measure the whole print image spectrophotometrically. The measurement results are logged. Prinect Image Control determines the deviations from the predefined reference values and automatically tells the operator what adjustments are needed. These are transferred online to the press which then regulates the ink zones in all printing units simultaneously and enables the print shop to achieve consistently high quality.
Prinect Image Control also contains a database for special colors and is Remote Service compatible.
Prinect Image Control is the result of many years’ successful partnership between Heidelberg and the Swiss colorimeter manufacturer Gretag Macbeth AG. Development work on Prinect Image Control started back in 1993 under the project name CPC 2S MIB. The aim of the project was to make an as yet unused technology – namely, spectrophotometric image measurement for regulating color on the press – ready for market.
The first product presentation took place in 1998 at IPEX in Birmingham, UK. It was accompanied by a presentation of the Prinect CP2000 Center press control. The new color measuring system was able to measure 160,000 points over the entire print image. No other measuring instrument manufacturer on the market has ever been able to produce a product offering comparable quality under series production conditions. Series production of Image Control began in 1999. Recognition quickly followed in the form of, for example, the GATF Award in the USA in 2000 and, more recently, the Deutscher Drucker magazine’s innovation award for the Color Interface option with Mini Spots. Since drupa 2004, Prinect Image Control has been a key component of Prinect Color Solutions and, thanks to its new software functions, supports system integration in the color management sector.
