Larger Waterless Color Space

For graphic designers, waterless changes things for the better. Photographic shadow detail is rendered more clearly through reduced dot gain. Best of all, higher waterless densities expand the color gamut and produce more saturated color.

The chart on the left shows the CIE hue measurements taken from three different press sheets using RR Donnelley’s Gretag SPM100 Spectrophotometer. The conventionally printed web data was originally part of Donnelley’s waterless study presented at the recent TAGA conference.

Several WPA printer members provided waterless sheetfed press sheets for the comparison. Due to higher densities, all of the waterless sheetfed press sheets examined demonstrated larger color space. The best of these sheets turned out to be from Bayshore

Press of Scotts Valley, California. A conventional sheetfed press sheet from Color Ad Printers of Monterey, California was also included for comparison.

Due to much higher densities, the color space perimeter of the Bayshore press sheet was 21.3 percent bigger than the conventional web sheet and 13 percent bigger than Color Ad’s conventionally printed sheetfed sample for reference purposes. Solid ink densities for the Bayshore and RR Donnelley conventional web are shown below.

Average Solid Ink Densities   Donnelley Bayshore Conventional* Waterless Black 1.63 2.10 Cyan 1.19 1.57 Magenta 1.35 1.70 Yellow 1.10 1.13 *Average of customer specified densities.

Saturation or chroma measurements were also greater than the two conventional samples. Bayshore’s press sheet was 33 percent higher than the conventional web sheet and 17 percent more than the Color Ad conventional sheetfed sample. These results support the high density and saturation claims for waterless printing with the Toray Waterless Plate.

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