Four Jury members from different parts of the world will join together to evaluate the General Print Quality of newspaper copies submitted by 128 participants for the International Newspaper Color Quality Club (INCQC) 2016-18 competition.

To secure a membership in the Color Quality Club, participating newspapers have to prove that they can print within the quality specifications of proven international quality standards consistently for a period of three months. The evaluation is divided into two parts, an objective evaluation based on the measurements made in the cuboid test element printed as part of regular edition and a subjective evaluation of the overall print quality of the publication, which is made from an “Expert’s point of view” by a Jury.

The objective evaluation for INCQC 2016-18 was started in January and was completed in March 2016. For the subjective Jury evaluation, the Jury members will convene in Chennai for four days from 2nd May till 5th May.

The evaluation will be made by the following Jury members:

Andreas Gierth, Head of Production, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH (FAZ), Germany
Andreas studied Printing and Media Technology at Munich University of Applied Sciences, Germany. After graduation, he joined FAZ in 1997 as a trainee and later promoted as an Associate in 1999. In 2004, Andreas became the Head of Planning division and in 2011, was promoted as the production controller of FAZ. Currently, he heads the entire production department including planning, ad production, and billing, creative solutions, and newspaper/magazine production.

Yong Chuen Nam, Senior Production Manager, Singapore Press Holdings Ltd., Singapore
Yong studied a full-time course on Lithography at the West Herts College, UK. For the past 24 years, he is working for Singapore Press Holdings in the production department. During this period, he saw the transition from Goss Metro press to Goss Colorliner and KBA presses. He is also involved in the training of printers in the theory of offset printing for the past 10 years. He is part of SPH’s INCQC team for the last 3 contests.

Aaron Phipps, Manufacturing Plant Manager, Advance Central Services Michigan, USA
Aaron Phipps started his newspaper career working for the Grand Rapids Press in the editorial art department in 1986. He helped start, then managed the image processing department and later worked for the computer systems department.

When the company owner decided to retire the aging Goss Mark II letterpresses, Aaron was involved in the planning of the new printing plant and press selection and moved from the systems department into production management. Later, with Aaron's leadership, The Grand Rapids Press qualified for membership in the INCQC 2008-2010 competition. In the 2010-2012 INCQC competition two titles printed at the Walker production facility, The Grand Rapids Press and The Muskegon Chronicle, gained entry into the color quality club. In 2014 The Grand Rapids Press qualified again for membership in the INCQC 2014-2016 competition.

Prashant D. Amritwar, Chief Manager Quality & Standardization, BCCL, The Times Of India Group, Mumbai, India
Prashant is working for Bennett, Coleman and Company Limited (BCCL), India’s largest media conglomerate for the past 20 years. Prashant has a key role at the Quality Cell to keep consistent quality across all BCCL print production plants at Press and Prepress Level.

Ink Optimization, FM screening in Newspaper printing, Image enhancements, and Internal Visual evaluation process are some of the recent projects that he implemented successfully.

For more details about INCQC, please visit www.colorqualityclub.org

Below pictures show Andreas Gierth, Yong Chuen Nam, Aaron Phipps and Prashant D. Amritwar (top-down).