NewsColor's New Stochastic Screening

By: E&P Staff NewsColor, L.L.C., of Mountain View, Calif., has launched Remarque stochastic screening technology as "an evolutionary step for enhanced newspaper printing," the company said.

NewsColor took Remarque to the Ifra Expo in Amsterdam last week in the hope of introducing it "to RIP, workflow, and CTP manufacturers for integration into their own solutions," said Sales and Marketing Director Karen Barr.

Newscolor says selective control of dot size throughout the tonal range allows Remarque to "drop into existing RIPs and prepress workflows," and that it can be "configured to enhance print quality on a wide range of presses, potentially increasing the life of older presses."

According to the company, Remarque eliminates moire and registration problems associated with halftone screen angles and produces greater detail and smaller file sizes. It also may yield ink savings, reduced make-ready times, and more consistent color. It allows different setups for cyan, yellow, magenta, black, or special color plates, and reproduce 256 grey levels.

Remarque was devised to overcome: stochastic screening's intolerance of press deviations, certain changes in film or chemical processing, or different manufacturer's plates; its amplification of dot gain and plug-up in shadow areas; the cost of buying new equipment to support stochastic screening; inability to hold fixed small stochastic dot patterns on press; inability to accurately proof one-bit stochastic dots.

Remarque adjusts dots to a newspaper's printing conditions, taking into account press, film, or plates used. Each newspaper can customize image highlights, mid-tones and shadow areas through selective control of CMYK dot size throughout the tonal range, unlike traditional stochastic screening, which produces variably spaced dots of equal size. Post-RIPed pages can then be sent to SeeColor software for inkjet proofing on butt rolls of newsprint.