Ridgefield Park, NJ - Agfa Graphics announced today that the Baesman Group, a single-source provider for marketing strategy, multi-channel execution, direct mail, and fulfillment, reports an 18 percent reduction in ink consumption since adding Agfa's :Apogee InkSave to its prepress workflow nearly a year ago.

Baesman, based in Hilliard, OH, has offered high levels of quality and service since the company was formed in 1952, specializing in, among other things, retail signage print production. The downturn in the economy forced Baesman to take a hard look at its operation and find any and all areas where money could be saved without sacrificing the high quality that its customers had come to expect. The company chose InkSave for several reasons: ink cost savings, faster drying times and automation of ink application.

"Using InkSave is all up-side with no down-side. Not only is Baesman saving money, but InkSave has also helped us to maintain color consistency on longer print runs and turn jobs around more quickly due to faster drying times," said Mark Acree, manager, Press and Prepress departments, Baesman Group. "With InkSave we have improved our make-ready time on press. The density can move five points in either direction without noticing color shifts, depending on the amount of InkSave being applied."

Agfa's :InkSave was recently put to the test at the IPA Technical Conference in Chicago. The conference demonstrated that ink optimization is a viable technology with real benefits, and that printers would be well-served by using such technology. For example, in the Press Drift Category the press was intentionally altered to increase Magenta ink and check the results in the optimized files, :Apogee InkSave performed the best of any system, with the best stability in drifting press conditions, less measurable change in color and the largest decrease in Delta E after optimization.

"InkSave was proven to perform with excellent results," said Deborah Hutcheson, director of marketing, Agfa Graphics, North America. "InkSave is unique in that it is fully integrated into the :Apogee Prepress workflow - all processing occurs in :Apogee's PDF Renderer to ensure that transparency and complex overprints are handled correctly. This provides greater automation and reliability. A change of press or substrate does not require a step back to an external application. It is handled entirely within the prepress system."

:Apogee InkSave users can save up to 30 percent in ink costs. InkSave automatically converts color spaces to ensure consistent color during print, by intelligently applying Grey Component Replacement (GCR) to swap out the right amount of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow ink for Black ink. Before and after ink optimization, colors look exactly the same, using a much more efficient CMYK combination.