Vendor Wire
Next Generation of Pantone System Announced

Written by PrintAction Staff

Tuesday, 11 May 2010

Pantone has announced the next generation of its Pantone Matching System called Pantone Plus. The system expands on its palette of spot colours, new premium metallics and neons.

“Pantone Plus takes what designers and printers know and love about the Pantone Matching System and supercharges it with a host of new features, colours and digital tools,” said Ron Potesky, Senior Vice President and general manager of Pantone. “The Plus Series provides designers with greater freedom for selecting, specifying and matching colour. And, since the Pantone Plus Series is based on the widely used Pantone Matching System, there's no training or new equipment required to start pushing the boundaries of creativity.”

Other features of this new system includes a more intuitive selection method via a chromatic arrangement of colours. Each copy of the Plus Series sold will include Pantone's Color Manager software, which allows designers to update their design applications to employ the new colour libraries and also allows users to convert spot colours to CMYK simulations based on ICC profiles. Also new is the myPANTONE iPhone applications, which lets creatives access the whole Plus Series on the go.

The company has announced that major graphic arts software and hardware vendors such as Adobe, Agfa, Canon, EFI, Epson, Esko, Heidelberg, and Xerox have signed on to support the Plus system.

The complete PANTONE PLUS SERIES includes:
    •    PANTONE FORMULA GUIDE (Solid Coated and Uncoated)
    •    PANTONE SOLID CHIPS (Coated and Uncoated)
    •    PANTONE COLOR BRIDGE® (Coated or Uncoated)
    •    PANTONE CMYK (Coated and Uncoated)
    •    PANTONE METALLIC FORMULA GUIDE (Coated)
    •    PANTONE METALLIC CHIPS (Coated)
    •    PANTONE PREMIUM METALLICS (Coated)
    •    PANTONE PREMIUM METALLICS CHIPS (Coated)
    •    PANTONE PASTELS & NEONS (Coated/Uncoated)
    •    PANTONE PASTELS & NEONS CHIPS (Coated/Uncoated)
    •    PANTONE COLOR MANAGER Software
    •    myPANTONE and X-Ref iPhone applications

Pricing for the Pantone Plus system, which is available immediately, is as below:

Product	U.S. Pricing
PANTONE FORMULA GUIDE (Solid Coated and Uncoated)	$109/set
PANTONE SOLID CHIPS (Coated and Uncoated)	$259/set
PANTONE COLOR BRIDGE (Coated or Uncoated)	$129 or $209/set
PANTONE CMYK (Coated and Uncoated)	$125/set
PANTONE METALLIC FORMULA GUIDE (Coated)	$69
PANTONE METALLIC CHIPS (Coated)	$169
PANTONE PREMIUM METALLICS	$79
PANTONE PREMIUM METALLICS CHIPS	$175
PANTONE PASTELS & NEONS (Coated/Uncoated)	$79
PANTONE PASTELS & NEONS CHIPS (Coated/Uncoated)	$175
PANTONE COLOR MANAGER Software	Free software download with purchase, $49 value
myPANTONE and X-Ref iPhone applications	Automatic upgrades for previous owners, $9.99 and $1.99 respectively for new purchases