I recently finished a year teaching at Cal Poly. I retired from that institution in 2020, and was rehired last year to fill-in for a colleague on leave. The course I taught was Color Management, which I had taught for 22 years during my career at Cal Poly. Stepping back into the classroom was interesting, fun, and sometimes quite challenging. I enjoyed working with students again, and I found them to be eager and hard working.
When I was last in the classroom, we had a Heidelberg CD74 four-color offset lithographic press. We had three of these machines over the previous 34 years, and the most recent machine was installed in 2006. I always enjoyed having the freedom to experiment with that machine, and I incorporated press tests in several of my courses using the press as a test bed. It was a fabulous tool.
After I retired (perhaps because I retired?), Heidelberg removed the press from Cal Poly, and we now have only a single-color Heidelberg GTO offset press. Though it’s a lovely machine, it’s not what I was used to having, and we never print full-color projects on that machine; it’s too difficult.
The year after my retirement, I taught for one year at Hochschule München, the Munich University of Applied Sciences. That university is the sister school of Cal Poly; we have numerous exchange programs there, and we regularly send students and faculty there as part of the exchange.
Munich has a graphic communication program that is very similar to the Cal Poly program. Interestingly, they have a two-color Heidelberg 74 cm. press that is used to teach offset lithography. Like our small press, it is never used for full-color printing, as it’s very difficult to do that.
While teaching in Munich, I was invited to see a new Landa S10P printing press at Blue Print, a commercial plant on the outskirts of the city. Our faculty gathered there and we were shown this amazing machine that had recently been installed. The Landa press uses nanographic ink-jet technologies developed at the Landa headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel. It is a production size machine (28 x 40 inches) that produces two-sided full-color printing that rivals, and often exceeds, the quality of fine offset lithography.
After that demonstration, I had that printing firm publish a book written and illustrated by my students, about which I wrote in several posts. You can read about the machine and the students’ work here.
In 2023 I was invited to visit two Landa press installations in the U.S., both in Dallas, Texas. These plants use the Landa presses for both commercial and packaging printing.
This year, while teaching at Cal Poly, I decided to incorporate the Landa press in my curriculum. It would have been impossible to have the students travel to Texas (or anywhere) to see the machines, but I did the next-best thing. My students and I developed a pair of test sheets to be run on the Landa press that we would later evaluate as a part of our study of color management in general, and of the Landa S10P press in particular.
I arranged to have these sheets printed at Brodnax 21C Printers in Dallas, Texas. Jim Singer, co-owner at Brodnax, facilitated this project, and made it possible for my students and me to have these sheets printed for the course.
This blog post, and several that will follow, are the fruits of our labor. I will describe the test sheets we made, and share with you the results of those tests. These results are, to the best of my abilities, reflective of the capabilities of the Landa press, and they reveal the strengths, and some weaknesses, of this technology.
The concept of a press test sheet
I have made scores of press test sheets over the years as a teacher. These contain photos in various formats, text in very small sizes, line art, solid-color patches, reverse-out printing, very subtle color tints, ICC profile test patch sets, rich-black tests, and as many things as I can fit on a page that will challenge the technology being tested.
In Munich, my students and I made a test sheet that was printed by the commercial firm. From that test sheet I was planning to generate an ICC profile that would describe the color gamut of the Landa press. I included one of the many available test patch sets used for profiling a press. I then visited the headquarters of FOGRA, the German printing research organization, to measure the press sheet, and it was an utter failure. For some reason that I was never able to pin-down, the profile described a gamut of colors that was about the same volume as the sRGB color space.
This is about the opposite of the capabilities of the Landa press, which the manufacturer suggests will print over 90 percent of the Pantone color library. sRGB, by comparison, is about 20 percent of that gamut. Something was wrong about my efforts to measure the capabilities of the press.
Despite that failure, though, my press test sheet yielded some very important results that my students and I used to our advantage when we published our book (more on that as I continue here).
Regions of the press test sheet
On these recent test sheets, I wanted to see how the Landa S10P press behaves with the following:
1. Color profile test patches – both RGB and CMYK
2. Color images in both RGB and CMYK
3. Embedded profiles – a wide variety from sRGB to ProPhoto RGB
4. Color file formats: PSD, TIFF, SCT, PNG, Lab
5. Grayscale file format: PSD
6. Duotone image, saved as Photoshop EPS, with three select Pantone colors
7. Very small type
8. Very fine lines – positive and negative
9. Text reversed-out of black, and text reversed-out of rich black
10. Line art scans of very fine line engravings at 300, 600, 800, 2300 and 2400 ppi
11. Halftone scan of the same engraving
12. 0-255 grayscale ramp in RGB
13. 0-100% ramps of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, separately
14. A named Pantone color
15. A trapping opportunity (four colors all intersecting)
I chose photos that would challenge a CMYK press: an orange pick-up truck, orchids with strong violet and purple colors, a hot-air balloon with a rainbow pattern, very strong red and blue colors in an RGB image, a highly saturated photo in RGB and the same photo in CMYK.
I know that the S10P press uses a Fiery front-end, and I had the printer run the job with CMYK color and CMYK plus Orange, Violet and Red (I was unaware that the press could be run in CMYK only).
I wanted to stress the system as much as I could to determine if there are weaknesses, or file types, or color spaces that the Fiery/Landa would choke on. Interestingly, all of the file types I included printed successfully.
The same cannot be said of embedded color profiles. I printed from smallest gamut to largest gamut:
sRGB, Adobe RGB, eciRGB, ProPhoto RGB
I also printed one large photo with Adobe RGB for half of the image, and the GRACoL profile in CMYK for the other half.
When I ran a similar test in Munich, the Landa press there did not reproduce the image with ProPhoto RGB embedded well. It was muddy, and unacceptable. My students and I regrouped and saved our files in Adobe RGB for the final book printing.
In the coming weeks, I will write posts about how the press performed on all of these challenges. It has been an interesting process, one that revealed some unexpected results, and some very pleasant surprises.
Check in here in a few days to read the next post.
