Capillary viscometry is used to characterize viscosity, entrance pressure loss and apparent wall slip of paper coating colors at high shear rates. Special emphasis is laid on the dependence of these phenomena on solids content in order to account for changes in the rheology due to the dewatering of the color during the coating process. Coating colors with substantially different runnability have been investigated. Differences in apparent wall slip and high shear viscoelasticity (manifesting itself in extremely high entrance pressure losses) are observed at increased concentration, even if these phenomena do not show up at the initial solids content. Poor runnability is observed when viscosity, entrance pressure loss and wall slip increase strongly with increasing solids content. But all rheological features change simultaneously with the coating color recipe and it is not possible to separate out the contribution of the particular rheological features on the runnability of the coating colors or to correlate the runnability to a single rheological parameter. Future work will have to focus on a numerical analysis of the blade coating process taking into account all the rheological features described here. First simulations including slip at the color/blade interface indicate that wall slip may cause severe runnability problems, at least when the apparent slip velocity exceeds the web velocity.