Unfortunately, our industry has accepted a culture of visual color control.What a
disaster! We forgot neutral gray and print accuracy. We even forgot to teach our
prepress people and press operators about neutral gray and print accuracy. The
introduction of the inline press had screen printers inviting clients to come and stand at the end of the press and sign-off on their creation.Neutral gray didn’t
matter. Accuracy to a print target was replaced by subjective opinion and hours of wasted press time.I’ve even heard production managers explain to clients that
screen printing is not capable of matching a proof. Now I see the same behavior
among users of wide-format digital printers.
Hours of wasted press time wasn’t so bad when prices were high, compe-tition
was weak, and runs were long. That has
drastically changed. Runs are not long. Profits are not large. We just cannot
afford to use very expensive screen or digital equipment as proofing devices.
