Totowa, NJ – The Pitman Company continues to lead the way in the area of color-managed printing. Southwest Precision Printers (SWPP), Houston's largest independent, family owned commercial printer, recently achieved G7 qualification using products and services provided by the Pitman Company.

G7 is the latest IDEAlliance process that outlines methods to calibrate proofing systems and presses based upon principles of digital imaging, spectrophotometry and computer-to-plate. It is currently being applied to many types of print including commercial, publication, newsprint and flexography. This methodology utilizes the existing ISO 12647-2 standards as the basis for printing.

According to Tim Tully, Owner & President of SWPP, "earlier this year we determined that to compete in the present economic environment, we needed more efficient equipment, workflows and processes. I wanted to improve our quality and efficiency, yet cut costs at the same time to maintain our competitive pricing. Pitman was the key to helping us coordinate and support the changes we have made at SWPP to reach our goals. We have implemented and changed our Prepress RIP workflow to Kodak's Prinergy Connect Workflow and installed a faster, semi-automatic Kodak Trendsetter plate setter. Concurrently we adopted the GRACol standard and achieved G7 Master Certification in our pressroom. Key to the success of that effort was Christian Schowalter of GMG Americas. We purchased and implemented a suite of GMG products for color management and proofing. We upgraded our proofers to the new Epson 9900's with built in spectrophotometers for auto calibrations."

Gene Green, Pre-Production Manager for SWPP went on to say, "What a huge impact the Epson's and GMG software made in the world of color management. What used to take hours of manual calibrations and profiling, now takes minutes with most of the process being completely automated."

The Pitman Company is the G7 expert, and have been promoting gray balanced and GRACol workflows for many years and have been qualified to implement the G7 process for the past three years. Our sales team has been active in promoting the latest technologies, processes and techniques to assist our customers.

"Gray balance is much easier to achieve on press and most jobs are close to matching proofs in the very first pull. Our make-ready time and sheets are less than half of what they used to be. Customer approvals have greatly improved as well. Many times the customer will walk-up, approve the color immediately, check it for content and sign off on the sheet without making any additional pulls", states Al Casso, Production Manager of SWPP.

For more information about G7 Qualification, please contact our Pitman Professional Services Group at 800-777-3729 or visit our website at www.pitman.com.