Tuebingen (September 26, 2005) – GMG, supplier of high-end color management and proofing solutions, today announced that the three GMG ColorProof systems participating in the independent comparative test of digital proofing systems on the occasion of the 5th Digital Proof Forum in Stuttgart again produced outstanding results compared to the competitor systems. The 5th Digital Proof Forum in Stuttgart was initiated and organized by the bvdm/ECI (www.eci.org). The event was held on September 20 and 21 on the premises of Stuttgart Media University. This year, 17 systems from 11 manufacturers competed against each other in the shootout. GMG had entered three systems: GMG ColorProof o4 with the Epson Stylus Pro 4800 and HP Designjet 130nr printers – each in combination with the new GMG ProofPaper semimatt 250 proofing paper – and the Kodak Veris proofer. The task this year was to simulate a sheet-fed offset print, produced on Igepa Profi Silk 170 g/m2 and Igepa Profi Bulk 150 g/m2. For the first part of the task, all manufacturers received the measurement data of the printed product, as well as reference prints that had to be matched as closely as possible. In the colorimetric tests, all three GMG systems achieved an average deviation of just 0.7 (HP Designjet 130nr) or 0.8 Delta E (Epson Stylus Pro 4800, Kodak Veris) in the "CMYK Media Wedge" category, values that no other proofing system was able to reach. The three GMG ColorProof systems also fared exceedingly well in all other colorimetric test categories. Only three configurations proved capable of meeting the close tolerances of the ECI recommendations (Delta E max. < 5.0; Delta E average < 3.0; Delta E primary < 3.0, Delta E substrate < 3.0; Delta H < 1.5), two of them were GMG systems. These results clearly illustrate the superiority of the technology of GMG's 4-D color management. In the second part of the task, the three GMG systems often achieved the top rating of 7.0 in the visual assessment. The GMG/Epson 4800 system was the only system in the test to obtain the maximum score in the Color (CMYK) category. These results demonstrate that GMG is the leader not only in terms of colorimetric assessment, but also as regards visual assessment, which is often of even greater importance in practice. As in previous, comparable shootouts, all three GMG systems again interpreted the Altona Test Suite perfectly. "We're delighted that all our systems again did so extremely well in both the colorimetric and visual assessment," says Robert Weihing, CEO of GMG GmbH & Co. KG. "You can't fool a spectrophotometer. Either the results are accurate, or they're not. The fact that only three systems met the stringent ECI standards, including GMG ColorProof with various proof printers, speaks clearly in favor of our solution. We were again in a position to prove that GMG systems are an inexpensive way of successfully producing high-quality contract proofs."