GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (October 23, 2008) X-Rite, Incorporated, the world leader in color management, measurement and communication technologies today announced a next generation color management software development toolkit (SDK) to allow third parties to develop high-quality custom ICC profiles for digital display and printing systems. The new i1Prism SDK will give X-Rite partners and OEMs access to X-Rite's state-of-the-art profiling technology and allow tight workflow integration with prepress and printing systems to create a high quality end-user experience.

The new i1Prism SDK features several unique key features including: X-Rite's groundbreaking Optical Brighter Compensation methodology, advanced controls for color separation and black generation, and X-Rite's unique iterative profiling technology.

With X-Rite's groundbreaking Optical Brightener Compensation technology, offered as a core element of the new i1Prism SDK, OEM developers will be able to build solutions that effectively and precisely compensate for color shifts in ICC output profiles typically caused by Optical Brightening Agents (OBAs) in papers and other printing substrates. This results in prints with an improved visual match and reduces undesirable color casts caused by fluorescence.

Thanks to X-Rite's unique iterative profiling technology, developers using the i1Prism SDK will be able to create solutions that require significantly fewer color patches to build highly accurate printer profiles. Small test charts with as few as 50 color patches can be used. The profiling engine offers the flexibility to optimize an ICC profile for specific spot colors or images, resulting in high image quality.

i1Prism also offers advanced controls for separation and black generation, allowing greater flexibility when building profiles and providing a high degree of control to the user when building their profiles.

While traditionally ICC profiles are built so that the output will be viewed on D50 illumination, the new i1Prism SDK is designed to optimize the ICC profiles for different viewing conditions including daylight, tungsten, fluorescent lighting, and more.

Niraj Agarwal, X-Rite's vice president of product strategy comments: "X-Rite and Gretag Macbeth have long had a reputation for having some of the industry's most powerful color profile engines. With our new i1Prism SDK, we have taken the best from both companies and developed a next generation, fully-featured set of tools that will allow developers to add a whole new level of color profiling accuracy to their own products and solutions."

i1Prism SDK licenses are available immediately for both Mac and Windows. The new SDK features multilingual support for global deployment, clear documentation, sample code and a sample application making it straightforward for providers of prepress and pressroom solutions to integrate high quality ICC profiling into their applications. For more information, please go to www.xrite.com.