Articles By Elizabeth Gooding

Elizabeth is the Editor and Co-founder of Inkjet Insight. She has a rare ability to see print related issues from many perspectives. She has managed creative teams on complex design projects, selected outsourcers for major brands and helped print organizations to retool operations, focus their market positioning and educate sales teams to accelerate growth. She works with a team of top analysts to translate experiences into tools, data and content to help print organizations evaluate the potential of inkjet, optimize their operations and grow pages profitably. She is a founding member of the Inkjet Summit advisory board, the co-author of an award-winning book on designing for inkjet and a curious consultant constantly seeking innovative ways to drive new pages onto inkjet presses.

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How to Make the Business Case for Essential Software

As faster and more productive inkjet devices reach the market, maximizing productive uptime is truly essential. Unfortunately, many companies skimp on building the costs for essential software into their inkjet justification. Find out how costly this mistake can be.

Inkjet Print Head Pop Quiz

OEM executives and analysts offer balanced overviews of the pros and cons of the different print head technologies, but to understand which is best buyers need to look beyond the head technology itself and consider specific characteristics of each implementation of the technology. Here are the questions to ask.

Screening Software Drives Inkjet Quality

David Zwang joins us for an initial look at an interesting new screening software development that significantly improves the quality of inkjet imaging. The software referenced is only available as an option from an OEM as part of their RIP, or as a component in a custom-developed (bespoke) hybrid inkjet printing solution.

Inkjet Growth Should be Faster

Despite what can be seen as very healthy growth rates, the production inkjet market could be growing considerably faster. Let’s look at the barriers to inkjet growth and how we as an industry can work together to tear them down.

January 23, 2018

Hide Your Data. The Hackers are Coming.

Three weeks into 2018 and it’s already been a bad year on the information security front. On January 3^rd Google’s Project Zero team reported a security flaw affecting any devices that use chips from Intel, AMD or ARM – which pretty much covers most personal computers, tablets and servers. There are two main vulnerabilities, “Meltdown” and “Spectre” that sound like they were named after Bond villains.

January 18, 2018

Peanut Butter and Workflow

A workflow is a workflow whether or not it is automated. Your process for making a peanut butter sandwich can be a workflow. There are lots of different kinds of software that can be used to automate different processes, and those processes can be considered workflows, but that doesn’t make the software “a workflow solution.” Many excellent software vendors throw a wide array of their software solutions into a big bucket called “print workflow automation” and that makes it a very messy fishing expedition for buyers to find a solution for the particular aspect of a print process that they are trying to automate.

January 2, 2018

Welcome to 2018 – Time Flies as Inkjet Accelerates

Suddenly, it’s a new year. It’s been coming on steadily for 365 days and then “time” happened over night. Those are the tricks that time plays. Many people who had

Featured image for “Skew the Gamut”

December 8, 2017

Skew the Gamut

Mary Schilling recently wrote about different approaches to matching Pantone colors on production inkjet. We got an interesting note from one of our UK readers, David Albin, who suggested that forcing

November 30, 2017

West Linn Inkjet Papers – Going Not Gone

A Good Inkjet Paper Is Hard to Find. Get It While It Lasts. West Linn paper mill will be shutting its doors at the end of 2017. The industry loses

October 30, 2017

Careful Consideration of Anilox Pre-Coating Systems for Inkjet

Anilox coating systems apply a precisely measured and consistent level of coating to a printed surface. The process uses an anilox roll, which is a hard cylinder with metal core

October 20, 2017

Inkjet for Direct Marketing Print– What Matters?

The market for direct marketing print is a good news – bad news story. Bad news: according to the Direct Marketing Association and the USPS, the volume of direct mail

October 10, 2017

What Inkjet Specifications Can Tell You

…and what they can’t. I posted an open letter to inkjet OEMs last week and got some feedback on the specifications people find most important when comparing production inkjet technology.

August 10, 2017

Transaction, Transpromo, Transitional Printing – What Matters?

Transaction print, transpromo and transitional print are all ways of talking about segments of the production print market that produce statements, invoices, letters, notices and other important customer communications. The

Inkjet Book Printing – What Matters?

Discussion of the key performance indicators (KPIs) and segment definitions that matter when evaluating equipment for inkjet book printing.

Featured image for “Understanding the Gray Areas of Inkjet – Grayscale”

Understanding the Gray Areas of Inkjet – Grayscale

Often people discuss inkjet print quality in terms of dots per inch and the number of colors available, but this is just a small slice of what goes into the discussion of print quality. To get at the heart of quality in the age of ever smaller print heads with more densely packed nozzles, we need to look at the gray areas. Join us for a discussion of grayscale.

Setting Paper Evaluation Requirements

Before you start any paper trials, know what you’re finished product goals will be and design your trial around them. Paper evaluation needs to consider a broad array of issues beyond compatibility with a specific device. If you don’t consider the big picture, you can waste a lot of time testing papers or miss out on opportunities to save money and improve quality.

RFPs, RFIs, RFQs and Cutting to the Chase

An in-house print operation at a large insurance organization may have very different requirements for soliciting bids for large equipment purchases than a privately-held, mid-sized printing firm.

Featured image for “RFP Checklist: Production Inkjet Requirements”

RFP Checklist: Production Inkjet Requirements

Before you can effectively research your production inkjet options, you need to consider the features that are most important. That, of course, is dependent on the volumes you need to support, the types of applications those volumes represent and whether those volumes are existing business that needs to be transitioned or new business for your organization.

Setting Customer Expectations with a Fingerprint

One challenge that companies new to inkjet face is to move customers from a model where they control paper buying to one where they are expected to choose from a list of approved papers. Another challenge is to get customers to send files that are designed appropriately for the paper selected and the device it will be produced on. One tool that can help with both of these challenges is what is known as a fingerprint file.

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