SCREEN Europe adds automated colour calibration to its Truepress Jet 520HD series

Konica Minolta Sensing and SCREEN Europe have developed a sophisticated colour-management workflow for the Truepress Jet 520HD press. All Truepress Jet 520HD printers from SCREEN Europe will now be equipped with MYIRO, a modern, automatic colour-calibration system from Konica Minolta Sensing. The new software – combined with an autoscan spectrophotometer – makes colour management much faster, easier, accurate and reliable for SCREEN Europe’s customers.

Essential step in printing process

“Colour calibration is the essential, final step in the setup of a printing process,” says Markus Hitzler, Technical Sales Manager Graphic Arts at Konica Minolta Sensing Europe B.V. “This step ultimately determines whether the qualities of the press, paper and ink can be fully utilised. It also has a significant influence on commercial aspects, such as ink consumption. Only with perfect calibration does the machine print exactly what the designer created.”

Until now, colour calibration on the 520HD printers was mostly done manually by technicians. It was a complex process, with many steps and chances for error, that could only be handled by experienced colour experts. It could easily take several hours before a printer was completely ready to run.

With Konica Minolta’s MYIRO system – My-Iro refers to the Japanese ‘Iro’ or ‘Colour’ – all steps in the calibration process are integrated into one and the same software. The tool guides the user intuitively through the workflow setting for density adjustment, linearisation and ICC profiling. Thanks to the new autoscan spectrophotometer, the measuring processes are much easier to handle, and can be done about four times as quickly as the one with the previously used measuring table. Each calibration step takes just a few minutes in addition to the printing time, with the entire calibration process now being completed in 30 to 45 minutes. This means that, compared to the old calibration solution, around 90 minutes to two hours are saved per machine setup to add to production time.

Built-in quality control

“The big difference with our previous system will be the standard built-in quality control, complying to common industry standards such as Fogra PSD, G7 Verify and ISO validation print, because this is what our customers will use every day,” says Taishi Motoshige, Marketing Director at SCREEN Europe. “Thanks to the spectrophotometer, our customers will detect colour differences before the human eye can see them, earlier than before, and in much more detail. The MYIRO software detects itself where the spectrophotometer has to measure. This level of quality management and automatic recognition makes MYIRO one of the most accurate measurement technologies in the market.”

In coming years, SCREEN Europe will roll out the universal colour calibration system for all its digital printers. On newly installed 4-colour CMYK Truepress Jet 520HD printers, the bundle – software ‘MYIRO tools for SCREEN’ and spectrophotometer ‘MYIRO-9’ – will be integrated as standard from now on.

For existing 520HD customers, a technician from SCREEN Europe has started to travel around to present MYIRO. The system can also be viewed at the showroom in Amstelveen and, from the spring of 2023 onwards, at the Inkjet Innovation Center Europe – SCREEN Europe’s future showroom and experience centre in Aalsmeer. In the course of 2023, it will also be possible to use the MYIRO system for the Truepress Jet L350UV series.