Knowledge Base

Design files can be pretty complex. A typical file could contain hundreds or thousands of detailed elements such as font families, lines, vignettes plus drawn and linked elements such as logos and photos. These may be created in multiple formats housing extremely detailed dither and color data. Designers sometimes go to painstaking detail to create a particular effect.

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.

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.

TAPPI is the technical arm of the American Pulp and Paper Association. They are an ANSI-Certified Standards development organization, and one of the standards that they have developed is the

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.

Fingerprints are an indispensable way to help your customers understand the benefits of inkjet and the paper selected for a particular job.

Have you ever completed a custom profile of your paper to only find out that when printed, one side looks darker than the other? You may notice that the ink densities are different, but may also see a visual color and perhaps a mottle, line and text clarity difference.

If you see any signs of cross-process density shift, get a baseline by running a diagnostic test pattern on a high holdout inkjet coated sheet.

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.

Stripes can be a wonderful design element, but when we see stripes when printing solids, we might call that “banding.” In inkjet terminology, it is more correctly referred to as “cross-process density shift” which is a bit of a mouthful.

We asked Crit Driessen, Vice President Strategy and Alliances, Océ Printing Systems to talk about the main ink chemistry advances driving  production inkjet systems. In this video, he talks about two key areas: advances that expand the color gamut and those that enable printing on coated stocks. Great overview of how it all works.