Top performance through printer calibration

Andrea DeRossi is one of the leading color management consultants in Italy and has helped more than 700 companies with their color questions.
Digital printers are expected to print the right colors, but oftentimes there is a lot of work that needs to be done to assure that.
Andrea, why high color quality starts with printer calibration?

Andrea De Rossi:

The quality of the color in digital printing starts with the calibration of the printer because the qualitative yield and the economy of each reproduction process depends on the essential optimization of the printing machine used.

You cannot start calibrating and profiling without making sure that your printer is perfectly capable of printing.

 By optimizing the printer you can make sure that:

  • The condition of printing is without defects: banding, mottling, bleeding, register, ink disuniformity, maculation, etc.
  • The technical limits of printability as a function of its resolution: minimum size of positive and negative characters o and the thinner positive and negative lines
  • The optimal distance of the head from the substrate

Once the printer has been optimized, it must be calibrated to ensure the repeatability of its technical conditions for the industrial printing process. Without calibration, color accuracy is not guaranteed with every reprint.

Calibrating the printer requires:

  • purge of the heads
  • Head alignment
  • Adjustment of the amount of ink according to the absorption of the substrate used (TIC = Total Ink Coverage)
  • Linearity of response of the tonal gradation of all the colors used
  • Ensure at output the same percentage of printed dot as the input file

Thank you for the explanation Andrea. Accurate measurement data is one of the key factors when it comes to high quality printer calibration. Dedicated spectrophotometers are able to provide the needed data.
Take your printer calibration to the next level with measurement devices from Barbieri.