Knowledge Base

Marco Boer of I.T. Strategies provides and overview of the 2018 thINK conference and his thoughts on the importance of user communities for production inkjet users.

At Print 2018 in Chicago, Mary Schilling of Inkjet Insight will be the moderator and tour guide for the High Speed Inkjet Print Advancements Tour. Sign up now.

Mike Dietz, Executive Creative Director with IWCO Direct discusses best practices in designing for digital and approaches to customer education on the wonders of production inkjet.

The 2nd Edition of The Designer’s Guide to Inkjet was released at thINKforum 2018 and the authors were there to talk about why educating designers is more important than ever and what is new in the updated guide.

Tim Cooper, Chief Enterprise Architect from Harland Clarke Holdings Company shares insights in a two-part series on defining, measuring and modelling workflow capacity for production inkjet printing. This article is focused on understanding the components of workflow and how it may impact capacity.

Crit Driessen, Vice President Strategy and Alliances with Océ talks about the fundamental questions to ask when selecting a press.

The growth markets for production inkjet lie in the segments where creatives hold sway. If you want to grow pages in these markets, you will need to get designers on your side.

Delphax Solutions Inc. (DSI), was created in August, 2017 by Air T to design, manufacture, and sell printing equipment starting with the elan product line. The company shared news of the new organization and strategic direction.

The Inkjet Insight team has dedicated a lot of its recent editorial activity towards understanding the impact of mill closures and paper supply issues on the production inkjet market. In addition to interviewing print service providers, equipment manufacturers, mills, and paper merchants, we also sent out a survey to our audience in order to validate what we were learning.

Mary Schilling discusses the opportunity for sheet-fed inkjet including the traditional barriers of paper, pricing and image quality. The analysis discusses the requirements for inkjet to compete with commercial offset printing.

Inkjet is a complement to toner and flexo in the label market according to Marco Boer of I.T. Strategies. Marco discusses the relative productivity, ownership cost and simplicity of inkjet for labels and takes a skeptical look at label personalization. When it comes to justifying inkjet for labels, think “burst volumes.”

In the past, when new graphic arts technology has been introduced, the first response has often been, “It will never be good enough to replace ‘X.’” It was said that offset printing would never be good enough to replace letterpress. Web offset would never be good enough to replace sheetfed. Toner-based digital print would never be good enough to replace offset. The introduction of production inkjet was no different.

Sheet-fed presses have traditionally addressed high image quality requirements, short runs, substrate flexibility, larger format applications such as folder or posters, expanded color gamut, and value-added enhancements. This article discusses the market opportunity for sheet-fed inkjet presses, a range of devices, and opportunities.

Mark Hunt of Standard Finishing encourages companies evaluating inkjet presses to look at the full process from back to front to ensure compatibility.

Steve Welkley discusses the approach that Xerox has taken to make production inkjet accessible to a wider range of companies.

Last week in Color Management as Crayon Space, I posed an impossible task: to arrange crayons in a line according to their color. Color can’t be arranged in a line because it’s three-dimensional. This post will discuss the three dimensions of color: hue angle, lightness value, and chroma/saturation. Again, we’ll play with crayons and some real-life experiments.

Chris Lynn continues his packaging series with a look at what has held inkjet back in the label market and, by extension, what has caused even slower adoption in the rest of the packaging market – and how these limitations are being overcome.

Marco Boer discusses the components of the “Other” category within I.T. Strategies’ research reports and why they are some of the most valuable pages for inkjet production.

Andy Gordon discusses ways that print providers and their print buying customers can work together to reduce the disruptive impact of paper scarcity. More planning, more testing and more emphasis on strategy can lead to shared success.

John Seymour joins Inkjet Insight for part one of a series discussing color management using crayons as a guide.  Part one poses the challenging of creating a linear organization of a non-linear concept.