“We measure every sheet, not just each job and recalibrate on the fly, early customers like it very much,” said HP GSB director of marketing Francois Martin.
“We can guarantee colour consistency across multiple machines. We have customers with multiple machines who want to split a job across them, with the inline spectrophotometer they can be sure the sheets match exactly.”
The colour control feature will initially only be available on the two new machines: the cut-sheet 7800 and web fed WS6800. However, the feature, along with other enhancements, will also be retrofittable to installed 7000 and 6000 series machines.
“It was important to offer the new features as an upgrade, customers need to keep their presses for 10 years at least and will expect a couple of upgrades in that time,” said Martin.
The sheetfed 7800, which replaces the 7600 adds a lot of the features first introduced in the 5600 including one-shot printing, matte ink, 'invisible' red, light black and digital special effects including texturing, raised print and watermarks. Intelligent automation allows the job queue to be optimised based on priority, length, image type or media.
Martin said the upgrade was made based on customer demand for the added-value features on the higher productivity press.
Enhancements to the web-fed WS6800 include new inks, enhanced screening, wider colour gamut and an increased image area, are all aimed at increasing the application range and cost-effectiveness of the narrow web label machine.
By extending the image width by 3mm to 320mm, HP said that customers can benefit from reduced waste through more efficient imposition. A new ‘high-slip’ white offers double the opacity of the previous Indigo white, reducing the number of clicks needed from four to two. It is also the first commercial implementation of the silver ElectroInk for metallic effects.
On the WS6800 the inline spectrophotometer eliminates the need for manual colour calibration, cutting 75% of the time taken to prepare profiles and match special colours.
