"Our partners asked for a cut down version suitable for digital printers that supported hand held spectrophotometers like the X-Rite i1, which we have addressed with the new Start version, which costs £2,000," said Alwan president Elie Khoury.

"The Pro version is designed to work with on-press spectral camera systems from QuadTech and GMI."

The first implementation of the Pro Version was at Italian firm Grafiche Mercuric, which wanted to match colour across its sheetfed and web presses, which it achieved late last year.

Another new feature in the latest version, 4.6, is support for X-Rite’s XRGA colour data standard. XRGA normalises colour data from X-Rite and former Gretag Macbeth devices, to improve inter-instrument agreement.

"Now standards have been widely implemented there is a greater need for common measurements across instruments and plants," said Khoury. XRGA, he claimed, could reduce the disparity from a delta-E of five to less than one.

Lastly, the software supports Substrate Corrected Colorimetric Aims (SCCA). This feature is needed to implement the US G7 specification, but can also help European printers working to ISO 12647 methods greater flexibility in their paper choices.