Canon U.S.A. Launches the Océ Color Control Suite for the Graphic Arts Industry

MELVILLE, N.Y. — September 30, 2016 — Canon U.S.A., a leader in digital imaging solutions, debuted the Océ Color Control Suite (OCCS), a software color management toolbox designed for color experts in all industries, especially those in graphic arts, at Graph Expo 2016, which took place Sept. 25-28 in Orlando, Fla.

For print service providers, color can be a vexing challenge with many variables. The process of managing color is a multi-step, continuous process, in which print service providers commonly struggle to allocate the necessary time and resources. On top of these constraints, printing environments have only increased in complexity for delivering consistent and repeatable color across their entire fleet of equipment, across geographically dispersed production facilities, or to meet recent industry standards.

OCCS is a color management toolbox focused on capturing, calibrating, characterizing and confirming color. There are five modules included in the suite: Catch, DeviL, IMProve, MatchPatch and spoTTuner. The suite works with any printing device – inkjet, toner or offset providing a single point of color management control throughout a print shop.

Océ Color Control Catch (OCCC) is the core module containing a multitude of tools for color measurement, quality control, certification, statistical analysis, ICC profiling, calibration and profile optimization. The module helps customers to achieve the best quality attainable by capturing and confirming print conditions across different printers, across different papers or even different print sites. By capturing color information of the desired target, it is easy to ensure the printer is in its ‘color ready neutral state’ and, over time, all the color information captured provides historical color trending statistics. Optimizing and maintaining consistent and repeatable color output, within defined tolerances, is a critical process of printing which helps communicate color accuracy and reduce waste.

A unique advantage of OCCC for Canon production inkjet customers is its ability to automate color matching in multi-press installs. It automatically determines optimal ink limit settings independent of operator skills and matches quality levels of more than one printer site thus ensuring consistency of the printed piece throughout the enterprise. Using the Color Control ink limit functionality helps optimize ink usage on inkjet production engines while still producing customer acceptable output quality.

Océ Color Control DeviL provides exquisite accuracy for color professionals. It offers a highly customizable yet comprehensive set of tools for generating ICC profiles to use wherever needed in the workflow or at printer level. Users can dive deep into profile creation and modification to achieve professional quality results. OCCS DeviL also provides for the creation and editing of ICC device link profiles achieving higher precision in color space transformations, otherwise only found in proprietary solutions.

Océ Color Control Suite, IMProve, focuses on auto intelligent optimization and processing of measurement data. In many situations, measurement data is not perfect and can result in inferior profiles. This may be caused by problems in printing, inhomogeneity or just errors in reading the patches. IMProve is a collection of various tools offering optimization of measurement data and correction for optical brighteners to G7 measurement data correction. The quality of ICC profiles is only as good as the data. Analyzing and optimizing color data results in a better profile quality and higher reliability of the production process.

Océ Color Control Suite, MatchPatch, modifies an existing printing profile so that selected target colors, spot colors for example, can be reproduced very consistently and accurately. These spot colors might be company logos, product colors or the fields of the media wedge. Finally, the Color Control Suite spoTTuner helps users optimally transcribe their spot colors into process colors; allowing users to determine for the conversion which visual color property — hue, saturation/chroma or brightness — is most important for the reproduction. SpoTTuner allows you to enter a pantone number and see if your printer, paper and ink profile can achieve that color gamut.

“The Océ Color Control Suite allows for more consistency in color output while helping save time and money in reduced setup, proofing cycles, print runs, which can lead to increases in acceptance rates of jobs, whether they’re first-run or reprints,” says Toyotsugu Kuwamura, executive vice president and general manager, Business Imaging Solutions Group, Canon U.S.A. “We are very excited about the Océ Color Control Suite’s offerings. This robust and versatile color management toolbox is a testament to our customer loyalty, and continued commitment to improving the workflow processes and engine utilization rates within the graphic arts industry as best we can.”

About Canon U.S.A.
Canon U.S.A. is a leading provider of consumer, business-to-business and industrial digital imaging solutions to the United States and to Latin America and the Caribbean (excluding Mexico) markets. With approximately $31 billion in global revenue, its parent company, Canon Inc. (NYSE:CAJ), ranks third overall in U.S. patents granted in 2015† and is one of Fortune magazine's World's Most Admired Companies in 2016. Canon U.S.A. is committed to the highest level of customer satisfaction and loyalty, providing 100 percent U.S.-based consumer service and support for all of the products it distributes. Canon U.S.A. is dedicated to its Kyosei philosophy of social and environmental responsibility. In 2014, the Canon Americas Headquarters secured LEED Gold certification, a recognition for the design, construction, operations and maintenance of high-performance green buildings.

†Based on weekly patent counts issued by United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Source: Canon U.S.A.