Historically colour management software has needed an expert to deliver results and this takes time. Xeikon has developed its XCS Pro 2.0 as a ‘no waste’ ‘no expert’, fully automated colour system. Xeikon now has the first digital dry toner, web press solution which embraces self-fixing colour control, quality control and ICC profiling plus Pantone/brand colour generation to meet all industry standards. Xeikon has built its new colour management system’s architecture to enable it to remotely analyse, target and fix any colour problem in minutes. Xeikon’s cloud based analytical tools can diagnose any colour issue and the issue is sorted with no delays which adds to significant time savings in production.”

Xeikon’s Colour Management Expert, Bruce Dransfield

Xeikon wants to instil a lean approach to colour management and make it practical for all their customers and users, which offers a lot of advantages:

• The quality control tools can be set to industry standards – either theoretical, ‘process corrected’ or ‘house’ standards and results are measured and traced using the new analytics in Xeikon’s cloud-based system.
• It is also possible for the operator to fix and re-verify the colour quality of the print on the fly.
• Xeikon’s dry toner engines are all fitted with inline spectrophotometers to automatically make this possible during production saving on waste and rejected jobs.
• For packaging and label printers, accurate brand colours are vitally important.
• Xeikon’s new suite of colour management software contains tools that can copy and paste from a pre-printed sample to optimise the brand colour for the selected substrate.
• Xeikon uses .CxF (colour exchange format) in order to communicate with tools found in the analogue world such as Flint Group’s VIVO or Pantone LIVE as well as proofing systems.

Xeikon’s XCS Pro 2.0 offers the printer the predictability and confidence to be able to match digital brand colours alongside the results from other processes. Printers can match spot and brand colours where Xeikon’s new colour tools remove all guess work and avoid down time by trial and error. Customer loyalty is crucial to any business, so repeatability and consistent quality is another important advantage. This was an early design specification of Xeikon’s Color Control toolbox to allow for reproduction of any job at any time with the exact same quality. Using the Inline Spectro-photometer supplied with all Xeikon dry toner engines, colour management becomes touchless and automatic. Last minute tweaks can be made “on the fly” and profiles, colour tables and quality control are all controlled by AI during production ensuring the highest quality print is maintained.