What is ISO/TS 15311-2 about?  
ISO/TS 15311-2 gives guidance to print buyers and other users of print for assessing printed products on isotropic substrates that are typically held at a viewing distance of 30 to 50 cm. It specifies the proper application of required, recommended and optional metrics, measurement methods and, where appropriate, reporting requirements in the general commercial market.
ISO/TS 15311-2 for printed output may be applied to two separate use applications:
- Printing output from a new general commercial printing system production run. The print buyer and the printer shall agree on aim values and tolerances for the metrics described in ISO/TS 15311-2. Aims and tolerances should be developed through use-case analysis. Measured values and ranges for typical commercial print output for a number of regions are provided in Annex C.
- Printing output intended to represent the capabilities of a specified digital printing system. This shall not be implied to represent the capabilities of that model or similar models of digital printing systems without documenting that it is representative of that group which is outside the scope of ISO/TS 15311-2. For this application, no goals or tolerances are required, but aims and results shall be reported. All care should be taken to ensure that the samples are representative of the specified system. For multiple sheets and full press runs, sampling, measurement, and reporting should be done as described in ISO/TS 15311-1.
Although ISO/TS 15311-2 is expected to be used primarily to measure prints from digital printing systems the metrics are general and may be applied to other kinds of print.
ISO/TS 15311-2 does not provide process control aims or tolerances as these differ widely for different types of commercial applications.
Who is ISO/TS 15311-2 for? 
ISO/TS 15311-2 on commercial print applications utilizing digital printing technologies is useful for: 
- Print buyers and brand owners
- Printing organizations
- Printing production personnel
- Printing equipment manufacturers and suppliers
Why should you use ISO/TS 15311-2?  
 When producing a colour reproduction, it is important that the persons responsible for data creation, colour separation, proofing and printing operations have previously agreed to a set of parameters that define the visual characteristics and other technical properties of the planned print product. It is equally important that they have agreed to the method that will be used to verify that the printed output meets these aims and tolerances. ISO/TS 15311-2 identifies the minimum essential metrics and optional metrics for analysing printing output produced for the general commercial print marketplace. ISO/TS 15311-2 deals with the assessment of printed sheets and does not consider how the process of printing the sheets is controlled. ISO/TS 15311-2 is intended to aid the printer and their customer, the print buyer, to define the inherent quality of the sheet using targets that can be included directly on the sheet (including the margin trim waste) or at least implied by the content of the images on the sheet itself. ISO/TS 15311-2 could also be used to assess the resultant quality of any printed sheet that had been printed using process control methods from any of the classical printing processes if the printer and print buyer have previously agreed.
