BST International and X-Rite have announced that they are jointly developing a real-time inline spectral color measurement system. BST manufactures web inspection systems and web guides, and X-Rite produces color management and measurement systems.

“The cooperation of the two global players will yield value creation beyond the current offering: For the first time both inline spectral measurement system and stationary handhelds will deliver comparable results,” says Percy Dengler, BST International’s managing director. “This will set a new industrial standard for color quality control and workflow simplification, as the system provides an answer to the ever growing need to provide both reliable inline and offline data on specified colors over the entire print production.”

The partners are assembling a team of engineers from both companies whose goal is to develop a fully automated and real time accurate spectral inline system that can deliver the precision and exact results required in the flexo, gravure and narrow web markets.

“Ensuring color control is the decisive key issue for the flexo, gravure and narrow web printing industry community”, says Dengler. “We at BST International are thrilled to be working with X-Rite to bring a jointly devised concept to X-Rite’s industry-leading color measurement technology.”

“Through our partnership with BST International, we are expanding our reach and position in inline color control technology into the flexo, gravure and narrow web printing market,” says Francis Lamy, X-Rite’s CTO. “The increasing demand in the packaging field makes it not only a very attractive large growth segment in the printing business, but it also represents a segment that values greatly accurate color: brand color reliability is an essential element of the customers’ perception that enables brand loyalty. Through these types of systems, associated to the PANTONE standards, and all the tools that XRITE develops around the PANTONE standard to increase its relevance and ease of use in specifications and design application, we believe this will facilitate and enable value creation for brand owners and all actors in this ecosystem at large”