Hewlett Packard (Palo Alto, CA, www.hp.com) unveiled a new collection of color sciences called HP DreamColor Technologies that are intended to make it easy to produce accurate, predictable and consistent color across a series of digital devices and applications. The initiative is designed to address one of the biggest issues customers face: accurate and predictable colors across display and printing devices.

Art Berman
Insight Media Consultant

HP claims that with DreamColor certified devices, user’s can work with confidence knowing that the color on their display screens will match the color on the printed image. The new technologies will be built into a collection of applications and devices to assure a consistent color appearance. HP Executive Vice President of Imaging and Printing Vyomesh Joshi emphasized that components that include HP DreamColor will feature this benefit, the greatest value will come from using HP DreamColor-enabled products together. That’s predictable.

The DreamColor system was originally conceived to help meet a request for color accuracy from DreamWorks Animation SKG. But after confirming its success at DreamWorks, HP decided to bring HP DreamColor Technologies into the graphic arts market.

The first products to feature HP DreamColor Technologies are professional photo printers and digital presses such as those illustrated below. HP anticipates integrating DreamColor Technologies into products coming to market throughout 2007 and beyond.

In order to deliver the required level of color accuracy, the HP Indigo 5000 and ws4500 presses include the HP IndiChrome system and HP ElectroInks. This helps professional printers match to the look and feel of offset. They can also print PANTONE spot colors by mixing custom inks from up to 11 primary colors. The HP Designjet Z2100/Z3100 Photo Printer series automatically generates custom International Color Consortium color profiles for supported media to quickly optimize color quality. This color profiling is possible thanks to integrated software for creating and managing profiles, along with the industry’s first embedded spectrophotometer - a sophisticated color measurement device - in printing devices of its class. The technology automatically adjusts for environmental factors that can greatly affect the color consistency of prints, using HP’s Closed-loop Color Calibration.

With printers featuring HP DreamColor Technologies, graphic artists and photographers can have better control of printing from inside one of their favorite editing tools; Adobe Photoshop. Using the HP Photosmart Pro B9180, designers can take advantage of the HP Photosmart Pro Print plug-in to configure jobs and print directly from Adobe Photoshop 7.0, CS and CS2 on both Windows and Mac.

At this time this article was written, we were unable to determine the color specifications and tolerances that underlie the DreamColor certification system. Nor was it possible to confirm HP’s intention to allow the use of DreamColor certification by other companies or their plans for display certification. We look forward to an opportunity to talk through these and related issues with HP personnel.

Since there is an industry-wide need to assure color uniformity across platforms, completion of a DreamColor "like" standard is both important and overdue. Making this statement a little more specific to displays, the main interest of Display Daily, a complete success for a DreamColor-like approach would ultimately be standardization of the colors produced by electronic displays regardless of display technology or manufacturer. IM will follow developments at HP and report back.

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