To address the growing interest of businesses that are demanding industrial grade solutions for digital surface creation ColorGATE is announcing a new collaboration with Italian high-tech scanner manufacturer Metis Systems srl with the scope to offer aligned solutions from image and surface acquisition to output rendition for digital inkjet printing solutions.

“We are excited to collaborate with Metis a leader in their field that shares a similar business philosophy as we do which puts the customer’s objectives results in the center of the activities. Jointly we can now close the gap between digital Input and Output and provide workflows that produce the expected “, says Thomas Kirschner, CEO and founder of ColorGATE.

At FESPA, taking place from 15th-18th May in Berlin, ColorGATE will be presenting a complete Scan-to-Print solution on the base of the Metis SURF 3D Scanner in a unique ColorGATE Edition in combination with the firms RIP and Color Management Software for a variety of decorative digital printing applications such as ColorGATEs Décor, Ceramics, Textile or Wallpaper in hall 1.1-A.40.

In addition to this offering for industrial digital surface decoration ColorGATE launches a complete solution targeting designers and manufacturers of small run and lower volume ace products that want to digitally produce this on commonly available UV flatbed or hybrid printers from printer manufacturers such as Fujifilm, HP Scitex, Inca Digital, Mimaki, Mutoh, Océ, Ricoh, Roland, SwissQPrint etc. The new solution makes it possible, for example, to capture natural surface objects such as weathered woods or leather including color, glossiness and surface depth information and to transform those in a new combination to produce exquisite veneers for furniture, tactile phone cases or any other decorative surface.

Metis SURF 3D ColorGATE Edition hardware is a revolutionary new high-speed surface digitization technology to acquire surface properties in 3D including color, glossiness and depth information of materials like wood planks, leather, stone, textile and wallpaper as well as fine art. The scanner generates a color accurate, high-resolution color image including embossing data and a reflectivity map representing the surfaces reflection properties. The system comes with sophisticated design and manipulation software to easily edit and model the acquired surface description data.

ColorGATEs range of digital printing software solutions covering a wide range of commercial and industrial printing applications ensure that the acquired surface data can be output on any of the firms supported digital printing systems. With printing systems that support multilayer or multi-pass ink-laydown of special fluids such as white, varnish or glossy ink, the previously generated and if required post-processed 3D depth map produces detailed 3D surface reconstructions with a color accurate image representation on top.

Another highlight that may be of interest to the large user base of Metis scanner users is the new option to use Metis color scanners as color profiling device in conjunction with ColorGATE RIP Software. Similar to ColorGATEs proven Rapid Spectro Cube technology Metis scanners can be extended with a ColorGATE software for generating ICC Profiles for digital print system characterization.

With these new joint offerings designers and manufacturers of decorative surface applications will be enabled to setup and complete digital creation and production workflows from Scan, via design through to digital print production.

“We find this cooperation with ColorGATE a great opportunity as we have a lot in common with them. ColorGATE is a company with a tremendous and unique technological background. We also have technology in our DNA and both our companies have been always looking for the future. Therefore, it was very natural for both of us to share ideas and then combining the efforts to address common issues that positively affect our customers”, Silvia Colagrande, President and co-owner of Metis.