Every vendor in the printer and MFP market touts how good their
color output is. And many dealers turn around and parrot that
claim.
But how many dealers actually show their customers how to get the
best possible color out of their devices? For many dealers,
telling the customer that their MFP or printer comes with color
management utilities, or Pantone matching tables is the extent of
their knowledge. After all, the service technician will calibrate
the printer/MFP when it’s installed or serviced.
But going that extra mile and making sure that the customer is
getting the best possible output at all times from their devices
means teaching the customer a bit about color management and
matching. It takes an hour or two of your time, but can pay off
big time when it comes time for your customer to lease or buy a
new machine.
The biggest step in the process is understanding that great color
requires more than a tech performing a print calibration, or even
providing your customer with one or more ICC Profiles. It requires
understanding what profiles do, and why they are necessary – and
then teaching your customer.
Color Spaces, Color Gamuts, and The Meaning of Life
Before you can begin to understand, much less train your
customers, why even a well-calibrated printer can produce
off-color output, you need a few smidgens of color theory. If
you’ve worked in the production print market, you probably know
most, if not all the following, so feel free to get a cup of
coffee, and resume reading further on.
A color space is all of the colors and hues that a particular
technology is theoretically capable of reproducing. A color gamut
fits within a color space, and is all of the colors and hues a
particular output device (like a printer or monitor) or input
device (like a scanner) is capable of producing. In most cases,
the color gamut of a device is considerably smaller than the color
space that a technology provides. In practical terms, this means
that there are some colors and hues that a particular output
device simply can’t reproduce, even though they may exist within
the color space.
If I haven’t already completely lost you, to make things even more
confusing, different types of devices have different color spaces.
Emissive devices, such as a computer display, generally have an
RGB color space. That’s because they work by radiating light in
different frequencies comprised by the three primary colors -red,
green, and blue. That’s true whether the display is an LCD, LED,
or CRT. The combination of these primary colors produces the color
pixel we see on the display.
Most printers, on the other hand, render colors reflectively, with
certain frequencies of light bouncing off of the printed surface,
and other frequencies absorbed by the printed surface. The net
effect of this is that we see a particular color. While there are
some printers which use red, green, and blue inks, these are most
often used in conjunction with a four-color process that uses
cyan, yellow, magenta, and black, or CYMK.
The problem with accurate color reproduction is that the various
RGB color spaces (there are several), and the CYMK color space,
don’t match up precisely.
One approach to more accurate color reproduction is the Pantone
system, now owned by X-Rite. In the Pantone system, a specific
color is specified as a numerical mix of red, green and blue. A
Pantone table in the printer takes this color specification and
matches it with a combination of CYMK toners, which will hopefully
reproduce to that Pantone color, or at least very close to it. So
if you know that a bottle of Coke in the image is Coke-Cola red,
and it’s specified as that Pantone color RGB mix, when the image
is printed it should appear in Coke-Cola red.
The Fly in the Color Ointment
But having Pantone color tables in a device is not the whole
answer to accurate color. It assumes that once the service tech
calibrates the printer, it’s going to stay calibrated, which it’s
not. And it assumes that the calibration procedure, automated or
manual, is actually going to produce accurate colors, which it may
or may not do.
Additionally, unless the user’s computer display is also included
in the calibration process, there may be a significant difference
between what is displayed on the screen and what is printed on the
paper. Finally, different output media produces different results
with the same output file. An image which is accurate on one type
of paper, may not be accurate on another.
An Easy Solution
So how do your customers get accurate and repeatable color on
different types of media? Easy – they have to use profiles.
Promulgated by the International Color Consortium, commonly known
as the ICC, ICC Profiles for the monitor and for the printer/MFP
are essentially data tables, similar to Pantone Color Tables,
which define the output characteristic of that device. Hardware
vendors generally provide ICC Profiles for their equipment,
sometimes even for different popular media types. And if your
client uses an application, such as Photoshop, InDesign, or Quark,
which are set up to make use of ICC Profiles, they will get more
accurate color.
It doesn’t stop there, however. To get the most accurate and
consistent color, your customer needs to be able to calibrate the
printer to the display and create their own custom ICC Profiles
for the media types that they are going to use.
The key to this process is a handheld device called a
spectrocolorimeter. If you are selling an MFP or printer with an
EFI Fiery controller, the spectrocolorimeter is available as an
option for about $1,000 or so. The EFI device is a rebadged iOne
from X-Rite, which you can buy from an X-Rite dealer. The iOne
works fine with EFI’s own profile creation software, or with
software sold by X-Rite for this purpose.
A $1,000-plus gizmo might be a deal breaker, especially if the
customer already owns the printer/MFP, or is going to lease or buy
only one or two units. But in an enterprise environ-ment, where
there are multiple printers and MFPs being used to produce color
output that has to be accurate, it’s really not a major outlay.
Fortunately, there are two other profiling devices available for
about half that price. While these are designed for the “prosumer”
photo market, they work very well for a customer who doesn’t want
to have to become a color scientist to get great output.
One of the first on the prosumer market was the set of monitor and
printer profiling tools from Datacolor. The Spyder series of
tools, now up to Spyder3, include separate display and printer
proofing spectrocolorimeters and associated software. Your
customers can buy these individually, or together as the Spyder3
Suite.
While X-Rite is a major force in the color proofing and profiling
market, it hasn’t abandoned the market for a more budget friendly
device. With the unlikely name of ColorMunkie, X-Rite markets its
own prosumer color proofing device. This is a single sensor that
is used to calibrate both the monitor and printer.
All three of these devices work pretty much the same. First you
place the sensor on the surface of the display and run the monitor
calibration utility. This places patches of colors where the color
values in the file are known. Comparing the actual values measured
by the sensor to the known values lets the software prepare a
monitor ICC Profile that shifts the color values in a display file
so that they will appear correctly on the display.
A similar process is used to prepare a custom ICC printer profile.
The software provided with the EFI ES1000/X-Rite iOne, Datacolor
Spyder3 and ColorMunki all print color patches on the printer
that’s being calibrated. These patch values are read with the
spectrocolorimeters, and an ICC Profile is constructed to match
the color values in a print file to the actual colors that you
want to appear on the output media.
None of this actually takes very long. Figure on about 45 minutes
the first time around, and 20 to 30 minutes thereafter. Your
client should perform a color calibration anytime they run a
color-critical job, and during a job every several thousand pages
to make sure that they aren’t experiencing a color drift.
Show Me The Money!
Okay. You’ve sat through the theory, sat through the practice, and
now it’s time for the payoff.
Part of the payoff is that if you take some time to actually try
these procedures and train one, two, or all of your salespeople in
them, you’ll have customers who are much happier with their color
output. And happy customers are good to have.
Another part of the payoff is that if your sales people understand
what’s involved in getting the most accurate color out of a print
device and can explain this to the customer in a way they can
understand, the customer feels that they are dealing with an
exceptionally knowledgeable sales person and sales organization. A
customer getting production-level sales help for a mid-size
workgroup machine is likely to appreciate it. That’s like going
into a Chevy dealer and being treated as if you were buying a
Rolls Royce.
Last and certainly not least, you can turn color training into a
revenue department. You don’t have to give it away. A three or
four hour hands-on training session for your customers, given
every month or two, is easily worth a few hundred dollars and you
can sell color spectrocolorimeter kits along with the training.
The Few, The Proud, The Colorful
Sure, not every dealer is going to see the need for going to this
much effort to produce accurate color. And others may just not
have enough technical expertise or confidence to add this kind of
service to their sales routine.
But that’s okay. If you’re one of the dealerships that believes in
giving the customer the best sales experience possible, those
other dealers afraid or unable to upgrade their customers’ skill
level just leave more possible sales for you.
Ted Needleman, Senior Director of Technical Services Division of
Industry Analysts, Inc. Industry Analysts, Inc., is a marketing
and management consulting firm for the office automation industry.
Much of the company’s research and testing results can be viewed
on their web site –
www.industryanalysts.com.
