Service Graphics has rolled out GMG ColorServer colour management across the whole of its Chessington production site.
The company, part of the St. Ives Group, has four production operations in the UK. At Chessington, studio manager Alan Clark said there were “a number of issues in matching colour output across our printing machines. We have perhaps the largest range of wide-format print equipment within the UK display and exhibition industry and with so many devices, processes and substrates it was always a challenge to produce identical results across devices.”
Service Graphics has wide-format printers from various manufacturers including Canon, Durst, HP, Inca Digital, Nur and Vutek. It installed GMG ColorProof, ColorServer and SmartProfiler a number of years ago, initially for bespoke projects and offered as an enhanced service to blue-chip customers only. The ColorServer system has now been expanded to cover the Chessington production site.
“We chose GMG as much for its ubiquity within the industry as for the enhanced quality and consistency that the product offered when compared to what we were using,” said Clark. “We fully implemented GMG ColorServer as a solution to two issues. One was to reduce the amount of manual colour correction we needed to do for profile-to-profile conversions and to bring customer files to within machine performance criteria. The other was to align output capabilities across all of our printing machines.
“Since deploying GMG ColorServer all of our devices are now in precise colour alignment with each other and across any substrate. Furthermore we have been able to free up available resources in our studio due to the reduction in manual colour correction work – a direct consequence of using ColorServer. The savings in production time, manual processes and reduced material wastage have been enormous.”
Apart from the internal productivity gains at Service Graphics, the implementation of ColorServer is delivering quantifiable customer benefits too. ”Since GMG proofs have become the de facto standard for many of our clients, the ability to match results across devices and media has meant that our customers have the assurance of consistent results regardless of print process. Now, with GMG ColorServer they can enjoy output consistency whether it’s a magazine ad, a graphic on self-adhesive vinyl, or a wrap covering an entire building.”