When your customer specifies a Pantone color, how close can your printer actually get?
In the competitive world of wide-format digital printing, color accuracy is more than a technical specification. It's a business advantage.
For sign shops, commercial printers, vehicle-wrap specialists, and graphics producers, the ability to accurately reproduce corporate brand colors can mean the difference between meeting a customer's expectations and settling for a compromise.
That's where expanded-gamut printing makes a significant difference.
The Limitations of Traditional CMYK Printing
Traditional four-color printing relies on Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK) to reproduce a broad spectrum of colors.
While CMYK technology is capable of producing excellent photographic images and commercial graphics, it has an important limitation: many Pantone spot colors fall outside the printable CMYK color gamut.
Bright oranges, saturated reds, vivid greens, and certain blues can be particularly challenging.
When a specified Pantone color falls outside a printer's achievable gamut, color management software must substitute the closest reproducible color.
The result may be visually acceptable, but it isn't necessarily the color the customer requested.
For businesses with strict brand standards, that difference matters.
Expanded Gamut: More Colors, Better Pantone Matching
Expanded-gamut printers go beyond traditional CMYK by incorporating additional ink colors that extend the range of reproducible colors.
Depending on the printer, these additional inks may include Orange, Green, Red, Light Cyan, Light Magenta, or other specialty colors.
These additional inks expand the printer's color capabilities into regions of the visible spectrum that conventional CMYK systems may struggle to reproduce.
The result is the potential to accurately match a significantly greater percentage of Pantone spot colors.
This is particularly valuable for:
- Corporate branding and identity programs
- Retail and point-of-purchase graphics
- Vehicle wraps and fleet graphics
- Backlit displays and promotional signage
- Packaging prototypes and branded displays
- Multi-location businesses requiring consistent brand colors
For these applications, expanded gamut is not simply about making colors brighter. It's about making them more accurate.
Seeing the Difference: Epson S9170 vs. Canon Colorado M
One of the best ways to understand expanded-gamut technology is to compare printers in CIELAB color space.
Unlike a conventional two-dimensional color chart, a three-dimensional LAB gamut visualization illustrates the range of colors a printer can reproduce across lightness, saturation, and hue.
The accompanying gamut comparisons illustrate differences between the Epson SureColor S9170 and Canon Colorado M.
Where the Epson's gamut extends beyond the Colorado's gamut, the Epson can potentially reproduce colors that the Colorado cannot achieve under the compared printing conditions.
These differences can be particularly important when reproducing highly saturated Pantone colors.
The larger the useful gamut in these challenging color regions, the greater the opportunity to reproduce demanding spot colors accurately.
Three Expanded-Gamut Printers Worth Considering
At Walker Supply Company, we offer several advanced wide-format printing solutions designed for customers who demand exceptional color performance.
Roland TrueVIS XG-640
The Roland TrueVIS XG-640 combines advanced print technology with expanded-gamut ink capabilities to deliver exceptional color reproduction.
For print providers producing corporate signage, wraps, and branded graphics, its expanded color options provide an important advantage when matching demanding spot colors.
Roland TrueVIS XP-640
The Roland TrueVIS XP-640 offers high-productivity printing with expanded-gamut ink configurations designed to reproduce vibrant, saturated colors.
Its combination of productivity and color performance makes it an excellent choice for print shops looking to deliver premium graphics while maintaining competitive production speeds.
Epson SureColor S9170
The Epson SureColor S9170 features an advanced 11-color UltraChrome GS3 ink system engineered for exceptional image quality and a broad printable color gamut.
With additional colors beyond conventional CMYK, the S9170 is particularly well suited to applications where precise color reproduction and challenging brand colors are priorities.
Its expanded gamut can provide meaningful advantages when attempting to reproduce Pantone colors that fall outside the capabilities of conventional four-color printers.
How Many Pantone Colors Can Your Printer Actually Match?
This is the question every print provider should be asking.
A printer's ability to reproduce Pantone colors depends on several factors:
- The number and composition of its ink colors
- The printable color gamut of the ink and media combination
- The accuracy of its ICC profiles and color management workflow
- The selected print mode and resolution
- The specific Pantone library and acceptable color tolerance
A printer with a larger color gamut will generally have the potential to reproduce more Pantone colors, but gamut volume alone doesn't tell the entire story.
The meaningful measurement is how many Pantone colors can be reproduced within an acceptable color difference, commonly expressed as Delta E (ΔE).
The smaller the Delta E, the closer the printed result is to the specified target color.
For example, evaluating the percentage of a particular Pantone library reproduced within a ΔE00 tolerance of 2.0 provides a more meaningful comparison than simply claiming that one printer produces more colors.
Don't Just Print Color. Match It.
For print providers competing for corporate branding, retail graphics, and premium signage projects, expanded-gamut printing can offer a measurable competitive advantage.
The ability to reproduce more Pantone colors accurately means fewer color compromises, greater customer confidence, and more opportunities to win color-critical printing projects.
If your customers demand accurate brand colors, shouldn't your printer be capable of delivering them?
At Walker Supply Company, we help customers evaluate wide-format printers based on real-world production requirements, including color gamut, Pantone reproduction, print quality, productivity, and operating costs.
Contact Walker Supply Company to learn how the Roland XG-640, Roland XP-640, and Epson SureColor S9170 can expand your color capabilities.
Walker Supply Company — Helping Print Providers Produce More.