No. I highly recommend it (if) the owner will purchase one. With owner being
yourself. You should get one.
Really, here's how I see it. I can only justify getting one during that time when an important customer comes in with a really big order and the customer happens to be print savvy and requires exact color matches (using process or sim process blends). We don't have any of those types of customers yet. We have some good ones that demand quality and visual accuracy, but not precise accuracy. even Disney didn't know what to look for when it comes to accuracy. Mostly, this demand comes from you.
The only type of customers I can imagine "requiring" exact matches to the highest caliber would be for reproducing a well known People or images such as museum paintings etc. (Thinks Andy Anderson). If for example, when doing a full faced well known person, you would want to be able to know your halftones and dot gain on press to be able to hone in on reproducing that quickly.Yes, you can eventually get an approval with a few changes if you are really good, but with a densitometor, you can know all of this for sure up front...and repeat it on re-orders.
As for us, we do really good with halftones and blending. We once did a 8 color sim process on colored tees and did the same job in cmyk + a base and top white and the cmyk came out better, more accurate.
If I say anything that could need tweaked, we probably have too little gain in most cases from the get go and more ink needs laid down, more angle, slower stroke, more pressure, more often than it needs to be right out of the gate. I could take a veery small step back to gain more in the rip. I'm at the point now, where I don't compensate much at all in the seps and let the rip do my adjusting. Some areas still need tweaking base don stacking and color sequence. We get approvals on high end work usually the first time, (in fact, I don't think we ever had a customer have us revise something once they've seen it for the firs time). That's not to say we don't try to perfect our high end prints before the customer sees first sample. We intentionally spend extra time on some jobs. For each high end job, (on average), I'd guess that we still need to tweak/revise something somewhere. You are probably pretty lucky if you get 4 out of 10 without ever revising to improve. If you don't ever need to, you may want to look at the height of your quality bar.
That was for fun. Keep in mind though, we are still trying to gain more and more new customers and really making the best of our prints for both show room and the customer.
We have what we consider (ISS and SGIA show pieces) for competition, but I didn't get them sent out in time. Missed the deadline this year in both cases. They may or may not be top winners, but they are very good prints and Tony Pepitone was a part of that at the time when he was with us. None of these were done with the results of a densitometor so is it really needed? It depends on you and what you want to put out. Your customer will not know if the 53% actually is a 53% or not, but it helps you to know.
We would not spend as much time on sample revisions if we had one. I know that, but again, thats me. I'm probably really the only one that would care. It's difficult to show improved results when you are already getting good results. Maybe the edge to proving it is getting there to the approved version faster with less revisions before submitting said sample to the customer.
When we revise in house, we typically revise a color or change a sequence or change up print technique like speed, angle. Only a couple times have we really needed to go back in and change seps. (pardon what seems to be boasting). Not intended.
