“On the name of Sttark, I would like to share our very successful experience with Alwan HydraFix®.

We are considered top printers, both in terms of speed and quality, in the label and carton market in the southeastern United States. This generates the need to demand the best of technology from our suppliers because we do so in the best interest of our customers (as you can see from our materials and website, we are customer obsessed). As a result, our requirements for a color management solution are very high.

At Sttark, we produce quality color prints, and we need the color to be beautiful and accurate, always and in a short time. Of course, handling 100 different jobs on the same day, one after the other, is a challenge for quality management. On the other hand, there are a lot of color management solutions out there, and we thought we would be able to find the ones that would allow us to achieve and maintain superior color all the time. However, we encountered some disappointment. We were disappointed that we had to repeat steps, or repeat the entire process, to achieve the color accuracy we knew our devices could achieve. In the end, each time we sought color validation for a new job, it took us 45 to 90 minutes.

Using HydraFix®, it is very rare that we have to run the check more than once. And now, thanks to Alwan and the API integration the company has done for us, we have reduced that to a 4-5 minute process.

As a result, we use an integrated system where each job contains the critical data that the system needs to associate it with the correct color, target, and track that we are trying to match. The ability to access all this functionality through a programmatic interface that eliminates operator overhead makes the whole operation more efficient than ever.

I think you will be even more impressed when I tell you that, unlike most other printing companies, we validate color before every single job. So, for example, if we receive 100 same-day jobs by 10 a.m., we’ll have them done by the end of the day … and every one of those jobs will have been optimized for color and accuracy with calibration and a complete press check before the run.

Choosing the fastest technology, in any process, usually generates a sacrifice in quality. With Alwan HydraFix® the opposite has occurred. The process is not only faster, but the quality has improved exponentially.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate our satisfaction with HydraFix®. It has become critical to Sttark’s success in the market. Overall, we are happy and proud to be customers of Alwan and look forward to the company’s continued development of what we believe to be the most important technology for color management.”