Basically, when you send something off to get printed or produced, if you use Pantone colors, the print company will use the corresponding Pantone ink, so you know exactly what color you'll get.
If you don't use the Pantone colors, you may get something that's a bit different than what you wanted because the RGB color doesn't necessarily map perfectly to a CMYK color combination.
What's stupid is that Pantone colors are still represented on a computer screen as RGB colors. So everyone could just agree to say "ok, yeah, use the Pantone ink that corresponds to this computer pixel color." But the mapping of pixel color to corresponding Pantone ink color is one of the stupid things Pantone has IP protection for.
In other words, I'm not allowed to specify "use Pantone red here and Pantone blue here" without using the protected Pantone standards that the companies and machines are built around.
So it's just standard RGB values with a proprietary tag added on. Which makes the whole "replace all Pantones with black" thing even more needlessly assholish. They could have just replaced them with an equivalent standard color instead and barely anyone would have noticed, but it looks like they shot themselves in the foot and pissed a lot of people off.
Essentially, yes. Basically, Pantone's real product is ink / paint / a process for inking/painting. But they've also protected the process for specifying what colors of ink you want to use, because you can do that in this godforsaken hellworld.
Basically, when you send something off to get printed or produced, if you use Pantone colors, the print company will use the corresponding Pantone ink, so you know exactly what color you'll get.
If you don't use the Pantone colors, you may get something that's a bit different than what you wanted because the RGB color doesn't necessarily map perfectly to a CMYK color combination.
What's stupid is that Pantone colors are still represented on a computer screen as RGB colors. So everyone could just agree to say "ok, yeah, use the Pantone ink that corresponds to this computer pixel color." But the mapping of pixel color to corresponding Pantone ink color is one of the stupid things Pantone has IP protection for.
In other words, I'm not allowed to specify "use Pantone red here and Pantone blue here" without using the protected Pantone standards that the companies and machines are built around.
So it's just standard RGB values with a proprietary tag added on. Which makes the whole "replace all Pantones with black" thing even more needlessly assholish. They could have just replaced them with an equivalent standard color instead and barely anyone would have noticed, but it looks like they shot themselves in the foot and pissed a lot of people off.
Essentially, yes. Basically, Pantone's real product is ink / paint / a process for inking/painting. But they've also protected the process for specifying what colors of ink you want to use, because you can do that in this godforsaken hellworld.