How much variance does Pantone allow for swatches when printing books?

The specific tolerance standards that are used are proprietary. However, so that you will better understand our process, I have provided the following information.

In May of 2003, Pantone achieved ISO 9001-2000 Certification. Following are some of our quality control procedures for all PANTONE Color Publications, which can be found in our ISO 9001-2000 Standard Operating Procedures for Quality Assurance:

* Base inks are checked for shade and strength. Adjustments are made until they match our standards to +/- 2% in strength and almost no tolerance in shade. Hue difference, saturation difference, lightness difference and total difference are evaluated under D65 and at 10 Degree Observer using the CIE Lab equation.

* A random sampling is made of stock from various skids of paper and checked for uniformity of color and gloss.

* Base inks and certain blends are printed on a production press to evaluate ink and stock. Color, gloss, quality of print, paper picking, etc., are checked.

* During make-ready, color is matched to previous color approvals. Stored wet ink density readings are used as a guide in evaluating all printed colors. Before running, these matches are checked by a Quality Control Supervisor.

* During production runs, every 200th sheet is pulled and checked on a scanning densitometer. Tolerances are set at a +/-5% deviation in density to the standard.

* Color approvals from the new production runs are measured on a spectrophotometer and compared to our computer-stored PANTONE Color Standards and previous production runs. Although the spectrophotometric data is very useful as a tool for evaluation, our final decision is always a visual color comparison.

* Printed sheets are cut, fanned out and inspected.

Recently, Pantone has taken the next step in achieving run consistency, by installing a scanning spectrophotometer. We are currently in the process of building a database of wet density readings. We will be able to use this data to compare wet densities to stored readings during the production run.

Please be assured that Pantone is committed to providing our customers with products of the highest quality and we will continue to make improvements to reduce color and print variations in all PANTONE Publications.