Xeikon America (Itasca, Illinois) has announced its new XCS Pro 2.0 – a fully automated suite of cloud-based, colour-management tools that deliver “every advantage of quality colour control – predictability, repeatability and profitability,” said the OEM. “Brand owners, retailers and the current high levels of e-commerce continue to drive the need for colour consistency across the entire print process.” The new colour package includes training courses as well as ongoing consultancy, and is offered as a ‘pay as you go’ subscription model “making it simple and easy to adopt and utilize.” XCS Pro 2.0 is available immediately for demonstration.
“Historically colour-management software has needed an expert to deliver results, and this takes time,” said Xeikon’s Colour management expert, Bruce Dransfield. “Xeikon has developed its XCS Pro 2.0 as a ‘no-waste no-expert,’ fully automated colour system. Xeikon now has the first digital dry-toner web-press solution tht embraces self-fixing colour control, quality control and ICC profiling – plus Pantone/brand colour generation to meet all industry standards. Xeikon has built its new colour-management system’s architecture to enable it to remotely analyze, target and fix any colour problem in minutes. Xeikon’s cloud-based analytical tools can diagnose any colour issue, and the issue is remedied with no delays, adding to significant time savings in production.”
Xeikon’s aim is to promote a lean approach to colour management and make it practical for all of its customers and equipment users. This pro-active approach will offer major advantages including:
- Quality control tools can be set to industry standards – either theoretical, ‘process corrected’ or ‘house’ standards.
- Results are measured and traced using the new analytics in Xeikon’s cloud-based system.
- It’s also possible for the press operator to fix and re-verify the colour quality of a print on the fly.
- Xeikon’s dry-toner engines are all fitted with inline spectrophotometres to automatically make fixing and re-verificstion possible during production, thus saving on waste and rejected jobs.
- For packaging and label printers, accurate brand colours are vitally important. Xeikon’s new suite of colour-management software contains tools that can copy and paste from a pre-printed sample to optimize a brand colour for a selected substrate.
- Xeikon uses .CxF (Color Exchange Format) in order to communicate with tools found in the analogue world such as Flint Group’s VIVO or Pantone LIVE, as well as proofing systems.
Xeikon’s XCS Pro 2.0 offers the printer the predictability and confidence to match digital brand colours alongside the results from other processes. Printers can match spot and brand colours as Xeikon’s new colour tools remove all guesswork and avoid downtime by trial and error. Repeatability and consistent quality is another important advantage. This was an early design specification of Xeikon’s Colour Control toolbox to allow for reproduction of any job at any time with the exact same quality. Using the inline Spectrophotometere supplied with all Xeikon dry-toner engines, colour management becomes touchless and automatic. Last-minute changes can be made ‘on the fly’ and profiles, colour tables and quality control are all controlled by AI during production, ensuring that the highest quality print is maintained.
