Knowledge Base

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.

Print OEMs need to understand that, for the foreseeable future, they will be judged as much on their paper program as the print technology they offer to the market.

Steve Wolffis of i3Logix shares his experience with moving from a toner-based web to an inkjet web that doubled their color capacity, improved color quality and reduced costs.

Chris Lynn explores the reasons why toner and inkjet account for under 10% of the volume of labels printed last year and why the label sector of the packaging market was the first to adopt digital technologies despite the uphill battle.

Steve Welkley discusses opportunities for Inkjet as part of an overall production portfolio that takes advantage of the best that each platform has to offer.

Production inkjet has been limited in its ability to produce customized jobs on a wide range of substrates due to a predominantly roll-fed approach. Canon’s research and development of sheet-fed inkjet presses has addressed customization and substrate flexibility while bringing the benefits of inkjet printing to an expanded application range.

My last post, Paper Supply and Strategic Planning, continued our coverage of paper shortage in the U.S. market. This post offers suggestions to mills and paper merchants on how they can help print providers navigate this difficult time.