Colour management: it’s harder (and easier) than you think

For more than a decade, Ricoh’s colour management experts have been dedicated to helping our customers achieve consistent and accurate colour every time they print and wherever their brand shows up.

Colour management is a complex business — and it’s not just about ink on paper. Our clients understand the value of strategic brand management, and when it comes to colour, their expectations run high for accuracy, consistency and quality from print output to monitor displays, scanners, cameras and everything in between.

“Easy” comes in varying degrees

Our clients have varying levels of colour management expertise and resources on their teams to help manage their output quality. While there is a tremendous variety of colour management software solutions on the market today, not all solutions are created equally.

Sometimes it might seem to an organization that implementing a new software will solve the lion’s share of their colour management issues — but you can’t just “set it and forget it.” For one thing, most colour devices require regular calibration, as well as expert knowledge to determine how often that calibration needs to occur.

Another challenge is that while the solutions may seem simple at first, they require a deep understanding of colour management for users to glean their full benefit. Many times, this level of expertise is outside of our clients’ core competencies, which can lead to negative surprises when things become more complex than originally anticipated.

A consultative approach

At Ricoh, we provide consulting services and step-by-step training to empower newbies with the skills needed to manage colour all on their own. We make colour management as easy as possible without sacrificing the quality our client’s customers expect. No unnecessary, confusing jargon. Just better colour!

Over the years, we’ve learned that every one of our customers prioritizes consistency from print run to print run. Accuracy is top of mind too, but in a high production environment, it often takes second place to that consistent brand output. Ricoh helps our customers ensure both consistency and accuracy through our deep knowledge of industry standards and years of expertise getting colour right.

Through close collaboration and consultation with our clients, we learn what is most important to them and their customers and then recommend solutions across different platforms that will deliver against their goals. From there, we stick around and work closely with our clients to ensure the solutions are working and also tackle any emerging colour management needs head on. Throughout the journey with each of our clients, we focus on the things that are most relevant and valuable to them — so that they can achieve the results they want.