Extended Color Gamut Printing. The Future of Perfectly Printed Colors

The imperfection of the CMYK color scheme has always been a problem for everyone who has to deal with the press, design, branding, and other stages of packaging production and preproduction. How we all wish to have a perfect model where ∆E is always 0 or very close to 0. Of course, there have been spot colors to come to the rescue. But those spot colors caused so much of ink and time waste! The necessity to change the fifth ink for every other press job can become exhausting! Every printing hardware provider tries to offer new opportunities for perfect color reproduction (and perfect also means convenient). And we at NDigitec Prepress have adopted the most excellent technology of such kind that is available today in the world.

Introducing the Extended Gamut Printing

For reaching the minimal color difference in printing without great efforts, we have begun to use the system of extended color gamut. This new system (which actually exists for about a decade but is now so much more popular) allows us to add up to three more colors of ink to the standard CMYK set. The most commonly used additional colors are orange, green and violet. These are the colors that the standard CMYK scheme almost always fails to reproduce vividly.

How Extended Gamut Works

The extended ink set consists of six or seven ink colors, depending on the particular design. The traditional combination of CMYK is essential, and then come the colors “opposite” to cyan, magenta and yellow. These are orange, green and violet. Some also use blue as the seventh color, since the CMYK often reproduces this color incorrectly as well. This approach gives us a new opportunity to the accurate reproduction of almost every Pantone color. It also allows us to get smoother gradients.  

But one of the greatest advantages of the extended gamut for printing houses is the reduction of the resources spent on printing.

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Save Your Resources with Fixed Color Palette Printing

So, we get this extra quality of color reproduction. What else do we need? The answer is the reduced waste of resources! Such resources as:

• Time
• Labor
• Ink
• Other materials

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Everyone in the printing industry knows how many various resources are required for a smooth printing process. At NDigitec, we use the fixed color palette solution to save a significant number of resources needed for digital printing and prepress. Now, let’s explore each of the resources we save.

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• Faster print process

First of all, printing with customized spot colors requires mixing those colors for each product. It takes time to mix the ink every time, and then the ink must be washed off, which seems to take as much time as the printing process itself. You also need to change the anilox along with the ink, so the waste of time is huge. Now all these specific adjustments have become unnecessary. Studies have shown that a fixed color set saves up to 53% of printing time.

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• Less work required 

The processes mentioned above, including mixing and cleaning the custom spot colors, are all done manually. We can now direct all these efforts to a more productive job. Roughly, we can save two working days in a 6-day working week with the extended gamut technology. Imagine all the work that could be done instead.

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• Reduced waste of ink

When we use three additional colors instead of one, it may seem like the process will require much more ink. But as it turns out, with a fixed color set even the ink consumption solution drops by 25% on average. The difference between the amounts of ink we use for a fixed color set and a CMYK+1 custom spot color set is obvious even for one printed piece, before taking into account the wasted/washed ink. Here we spend an average of 15-18% less ink.

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• Reduction of other materials

As the printing with an extended color gamut is much more accurate, we get a lower rate of paper waste as well. Also, printing houses spend a great deal on the solvents for washing the custom color ink every time. Count all the spendings that you could cut down and you will be surprised how much this fixed color set will save to your budget.

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Short Production Runs Made Easy

There were times when short-run packages even sounded scary. A promotional packaging line was a luxury that not every brand could afford. Now, thanks to a fixed ink set, with all the reduced costs, short runs are more affordable than ever!

For each of the inks, we use flexo plates with highly accurate dots. And considering the amount of total saving, the plates cost plays the smallest role.

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Equinox for the First Time in GCC

At NDigitec Premedia, we use the Equinox fixed ink set solution by ESKO. Its benefits are apparent, and the solution gains popularity all over the world. However, many providers in our market still use one custom Pantone color with the CMYK set. In the GCC & Middle East region, NDigitec is the first prepress solution provider that has implemented Equinox. Use this chance to get the exceptional printing quality at reduced costs!