Sheetfed Offset--Running With The Big Dogs

Heidelberg launched PresetLink with its CP2000, which debuted in 1998. The PresetLink, when combined with CPC PrepressInterface, allows the user to take digital prepress data and deliver it directly to the press to preset ink keys.

Another step in integrating prepress and press, according to Dowey, is integrating prepress to color control. "We've devised a way to take a digital image of what the job is supposed to look like and loaded it into our closed-loop color control system, called CPC24 ImageControl," Dowey notes. "ImageControl scans across the sheet and measures—in 160,000 places on a sheet—the spectrophotometric color values. With PresetLink for ImageControl, we can take data from electronic prepress and put into the ImageControl system exactly what the L*a*b* values are supposed to be in that job, in every pixel.