Printing Catalogs and Magazines with Production Inkjet

Jacki Hudmon, of Komori America talks to Elizabeth Gooding about why Komori is the best kept secret in production inkjet. Komori has committed to the market with a portfolio of inkjet products with multiple types of inks, multiple types of heads and even multiple approaches to getting the ink on the substrate in order to serve different aspects of their commercial print-focused customer base. Watch now to learn about Komori’s growth roadmap.

Inkjet Insight maps out I.T. Strategies North American print volume data to explore opportunities for production inkjet technologies. The map looks packaging, publishing, and document application categories. Production inkjet has been successful with applications that have light ink coverage printed on uncoated stocks … namely, transactional, direct mail, and some book applications. Many of these applications were converted from high-speed roll-fed toner devices and inkjet provided economic and process benefits and by adding color. Inkjet also provided the ability to add value to printed pages. It’s useful to look at the entire market to help put this area of success in perspective and to think about the requirements for expanding adoption.

The catalog market looks unexpectedly bright for 2019, both due to retail brands embracing direct mail and advances in inkjet technology to meet the needs of this challenging application segment.

Printing from the first tower allows ink twice as long to dry helping reduce roller build up and print defects in finishing.

If you are using inkjet coated or primed offset coated paper, different papers will have different porosity levels on each side of the sheet.

“To the inkjet world changing their name to Pixelle is quite fitting as it is Glatfelter’s performance inkjet brand compatible on high speed inkjet devices.” -Mary Schilling Find Pixelle Performance

In this video Elizabeth Gooding shows the event magazine developed by WhatTheyThink and Printing News and the trend toward inkjet compatibility with offset grades.

Highlights from the latest Smithers Pira report: The Future of Inkjet Printing to 2023 project that the value of the global inkjet market will rise at 9.4% over the next five years. As the global print market transforms, shifts in buyer demands—short runs, versioned and personalized products—and higher quality are aligning with the capabilities of inkjet. This is making it a key focus for technology developers. This analysis shows that inkjet will grow by deepening its penetration into existing markets and exploiting new emergent market opportunities through 2023.

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.

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.

Paper whiteness is particularly important in markets for which small text and readability is important such as book as well as magazine. For magazine images, the level of OBA’s in the paper can affect color reproduction accuracy of certain colors combinations.

Offset printing satisfies the majority of the production requirements for both catalogs and magazines. As marketers seek to increase ROI, you can start to make the case for shorter runs, versioning, hyper-localization, and personalization and then inkjet printing starts to become interesting.

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.