Color management has caused an explosion of opportunities for new and interesting inks on a variety of substrates like paper, fabric, ceramic, transparent, and more. To ensure you can maintain accurate color when running jobs with these new applications, you need to create a printer profile for every printer, ink, and substrate combination. X-Rite offers the right tools to make profile creation fast and easy.
Color Measurement Tools
The i1Pro 3 Family has you covered for virtually any print job. i1Pro 3 and i1Pro 3 plus are handheld spectrophotometers that come with 2 choices of software packages that allow you to create profiles for all the devices in your workflow.
- Printing on smooth paper? i1Pro 3 will work for you.
- Printing on specialty photo paper, vinyl, textile, transparent film, corrugated, or backlit material? You need the i1Pro 3 Plus with a larger aperture to capture all the color data needed to create the most accurate printer profile. It also comes with a polarization filter for improved profiles on textured and glossy media to reduce unwanted specular highlights, enhance blacks for better shadow detail, and get richer colors on unique surfaces.
Even with the best device, measuring test charts to create these profiles can be time-consuming to manage in a high-volume production environment.
Adding Automation
Automated chart readers take on the burden of measuring test charts, which can have hundreds – even thousands – of patches. Not only do they remove user error from the equation they also allow you to finish other tasks while the chart reader is busy at work. They’re consistent and reliable and make it faster and easier to meet the creative demands of your customers.
Hands-Free Scanning Solutions
X-Rite’s hands-free patch readers provide support for a variety of media, ink, and printer combinations and offers modes for accommodating UV illumination and optical brighteners. They’re also directly supported in X-Rite (and almost all third-party) software programs for profiling.
The i1iO for i1Pro 3 and i1Pro 3 Plus can be added to your workflow at any time. Simply drop your i1Pro 3 or i1Pro 3 Plus device into the cradle for hands-free chart reading. I1iO reads more than 500 patches per minute in scanning mode under the M0 measurement condition to quickly create custom profiles. It has a robotic arm that attaches to the device and moves it over each patch on the test chart. It can adjust in height to accommodate media up to 10mm thick, and up to 33mm thick with the optional Z-axis spacer.
If you deal with both flexible and rigid substrates like so many in the wide-format world, you’ll appreciate the i1iO’s ability to quickly measure a multi-page target by simply defining three location points, then instructing the software to operate in either a single-scan or dual-scan mode. Even if the printer produces a low-resolution print, the i1iO table can automatically perform what could be a tedious manual measurement task.
Is Automated Scanning Worth the Investment?
Any company doing daily QA evaluation or frequent creation of ICC profiles will benefit from the added productivity of an automated chart reader for measuring and controlling color on virtually any substrate.
Plus, automated scanning with i1Pro 3 Plus can open the door to non-traditional media like wood, acrylic, textiles, and backlit materials. Here, the X-Rite i1iO for i1Pro 3 Plus scanning table automates the process of measuring a reflective profiling target to create a profile for a recent project at Four Hands Studio in Austin, Texas.
If you’re thinking of adding an i1iO chart reading system to your profiling workflow Get in touch to learn more about this product and our current promotions.
