Knowledge Base

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.

Robert Clark of IWCO Direct discusses their experience migrating from conventional print to production inkjet. The pros far outweighed the cons, but that doesn’t mean the journey to inkjet came without a learning curve.

Inkjet Insight is closely watching the challenging paper shortage in the U.S. market. Our team  has covered different aspects of this topic from pulp trends to impacts to the supply chain. Most recently, we have been interviewing subject matter experts throughout the paper supply chain to gain a holistic view of the market. It’s clear that the tight paper market is driving frustration and change and it’s incumbent on participants throughout the supply chain to consider how to solve this challenge.

Eric Wiesner, General Manager of HP PageWide Industrial Division provides background on HP’s decision to expand the range of media compatibility for HP devices using a pre-coat or primer rather than adding additional solvents, resins and other chemistry to the ink.

Last week Zanders GmbH issued a press release regarding the continued restructuring process for the company. The release included a sentiment that we don’t often hear in these types of announcements: optimism.

I had the opportunity to see the Ricoh Pro VC70000 in action at Ricoh’s Boulder Colorado Customer Experience Center last week and to learn about some of the innovations that differentiate it from the rest of the Pro VC lineup. While visually similar to the VC 60000, the VC7000 offers three key innovations: new ink chemistry, advanced drying technology and finely controlled drop sizes.

Christian Heneke of Service & Print Group Haberbeck gave a presentation today at the Ricoh Interact 2018 event on offset and inkjet working together. Like many companies, Haberbeck looked at the volumes of current work that could be transferred to inkjet, but he had a broader message.

We caught up with Marco Boer at the unveiling of the Océ LabelStream 4000. Canon is entering the label and packaging market with a high-end, hybrid system targeting adhesive label applications. Marco provides a great overview of what was learned in Germany.

The package printing climate is changing, and waves of new technology are breaking on the shores of short-run work, but the packaging mainland is mostly unaffected so far. Chris Lynn offers insights on the packaging market for inkjet.

Elizabeth asked David Murphy of HP PageWide Industrial what he thought customers should be considering and his first response was to say that customers should be taking a long term view – multiple years out. He said customers should be thinking in terms of the ability for the device to remain relevant as inkjet continues to evolve.

Knowing he color capabilities of your inkjet device is very important, but understanding the color capabilities of your press crew is critical. Visually tweaking or modifying color on press is never an efficient or repeatable way to run production. Making your staff aware of their potential vision deficiencies will help catch color, as well as print quality issues, before they get to your customer. Here are some things you should know.

There are a number of issues with the inkjet paper supply chain that are going to test your paper qualification and sourcing policies. You will need to test more papers, track them carefully and ensure that your receiving dock runs like a NASCAR pit stop. Here are a few survival tips.

This week Elizabeth Gooding was the keynote speaker and panel moderator at a thought leadership workshop hosted by Xerox at its Gil Hatch Center for Customer Innovation. Xerox assembled a group of print operation executives from transactional, book, inplant, and commercial printing to explore production inkjet opportunities.

The demand for paper and pulp is growing and the supply chain is having a hard time keeping up. We lost a couple of other mills over the past year, West Lynn and Appleton, contributing to a 16% overall loss in inventory.

As inkjet moves into applications with high ink coverage and quality demands, users can run into some hard to diagnose problems. If you only focus on the paper and the print heads when trying to diagnose print quality issues, you could struggle for a long time looking in the wrong places.