Today’s market pressures are pushing consumer-product companies (CPCs) and their suppliers to consider every possible opportunity for competitive advantages in time-to-market, shelf impact and cost savings. Extended (or expanded) color gamut printing warrants a first or perhaps a second look.

Every converter understands the practical limitations of printing with a conventional four-color process set of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Unfortunately, designers love to push these limits, selecting colors that don’t print properly as separations. It’s impossible to accurately match the full range of specialty or spot colors. In fact, by Pantone’s own reckoning, only 60 percent of its swatchbook can be matched without the application of some level of special technique.

The problem is one of science, not craftsmanship: the color gamut of conventional CMYK is smaller than the entire range of the printable color spectrum. Designers, and their clients, require spot colors for brand-color fidelity. A costly, complicated and time-consuming choice, but let’s face it, one that works. The volume of spot colors shows no signs of declining, being limited only by the buyer’s budget. Cost pressures, both direct and indirect, are in fact the catalyst that’s driving many to seek alternatives to spot colors. As both budgets and schedules shrink, CPCs are more interested in their vendors providing ways to deliver high-impact color graphics, quickly and cost effectively.

Over 10 years ago, printers began adding or substituting inks to the conventional CMYK set to expand the printable gamut to accommodate challenging but popular color ranges such as blues, oranges or greens in process work. Most of us are familiar with the first commercialized products in this area such as Pantone’s Hexachrome and Opaltone from Opaltone PLC. Although these products yielded exceptional results, none met with major commercial success. Their low adoption at that time can be attributed to several factors, including the variety of workflows and customer needs, as well as difficult implementation, limitations in the platemaking and printing processes, less than 100 percent of colors being reproducible and lack of a complementary proofing system. Ultimately there was a lack of compelling motivation for buyers and no clear return on investment for the tradeshop or converter.

Today most of these obstacles have been addressed and a reinvestigation of the current crop of extended color gamut systems is warranted. Although today’s extended gamut printing solutions still cannot reproduce 100 percent of the spot-color palette, they are much closer—thanks to improvements in the systems themselves, as well as supporting innovation. The products not only accurately match a greater number of colors but are easier to use and im-plement.

The benefits to extended color gamut printing are numerous.

• Special colors without the incremental costs,

• Jobs with multiple colors in a single pass,

• Shorter makeready time,

• Opportunity to gang jobs of the same stock,

• Reduction of waste materials and press downtime,

• Reduced ink inventory,

• Less color correction; more predictable and consistent color.

Proponents and practitioners report that image quality and graphic impact is increased; with truer skin tones and pastels as well as vibrant solids.

Extended color gamut printing systems are not without cost and time implications. In addition to the investment in the software itself, there will be other supporting equipment required, and if the converter isn’t already running to tight tolerances there will be expense in getting there. A few other considerations include:

• Press cylinders need to at least match the requirements of the color model (five, six or seven colors).

• Some jobs may be more costly to run, as the number of plates required could be greater.

• A number of the systems require single-source specialty inks that can command a premium.

• Additional passes or cylinders are required for gloss, varnish or metallic.

• For flexographic work, the high color densities of extended color systems can be difficult with UV inks and fine-line anilox rolls.

• Trapping and screening will be more challenging.

• Clients may still require spots for brand colors, but some systems will accommodate and even incorporate these into their color set.

The greatest obstacles to an ex-tended color gamut implementation may relate to customer expectations and job coordination; a great deal of discussion and planning needs to occur to achieve success.

None of these issues are insurmountable. Next month I’ll offer an outline for moving forward.