Customer Q & A: Which Wedge Is Best?
Recently, a color process control manager at a large print production facility wanted to know if there is a more comprehensive chart available for daily digital color evaluations than an 12647-7 proofing wedge. He pointed out the IT8.7-4 has too many patches, and the P2P51 has too many gray finder patches. Reiterating a thought we’ve all had many times, he asked: “Am I overthinking the value of additional patches?”
Great question!
There is a trade-off between patch count and how effective a chart is at gathering QC information. There is also something to be said for both extremes; too many patches and too few patches. Too many patches on a noisy (grainy, low screen ruling, etc.) printing device can cause unwanted noise in the measurement data (like using a 1 pixel eyedropper setting in photoshop to determine the dot percentage in a noisy image). Too few patches and you are not sampling enough colors to accurately model how the device is printing.
