For nearly ten years, InkZone has been a leading, manufacturer-independent color control solution for sheetfed offset presses. With several thousand installations around the world, InkZone has proven to be a reliable solution for ink-key presetting as well as closed-loop color control, yielding the highest accuracy through real-time monitoring of each press run.

Earlier this year, Digital Information developed an extension of the InkZone solution which allows cost savings to be realized at print shops with commercial web offset presses from a wide variety of manufacturers.

Now printers with web offset presses from KBA, Heidelberg, Goss, Manroland, Muller-Martini, Drent Goebel, Sanden, Komori, Mitsubishi, and others can take full advantage of InkZone presetting via this new capability. In 2011, web-offset compatibility will be extended to nearly all manufacturers, rivaling the long-standing, wide support capability of InkZone for sheetfed press applications.

With the faster speeds and potential for cost savings associated with roll-fed offset presses, the affordable InkZone presetting solution can yield an impressive reduction in paper waste – often providing investment payback within several months or less. In addition, print quality can be increased in parallel, providing improved capability and the potential to expand to new print markets.

At CPC in Skopje/Macedonia, InkZone provides better control of a Harris M-1000.
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By making use of off-the-shelf scanning spectrophotometers, InkZone allows adherence to color standards or specifications such as ISO, SWOP, or GraCol. These specifications, as well as any customer-specific quality requirements, can easily be monitored using a direct, network interface between the printing press and InkZone. And InkZone’s report-generation tool provides the ability to provide a record of the quality results to meet customer scorecard or reporting requirements.

Overall, investing in InkZone pays off with new or legacy offset presses, in either sheetfed or web configurations. In many cases, the life cycle of existing installations can be extended by several crucial years; plus InkZone offers a consistent control interface and the potential for improved print quality.