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Traditional transaction documents are turning into “transitional” documents with more personalization, graphics and color. Unfortunately, some of those transactional images are looking a bit ragged.  I’ve started counting the number

Mary Schilling recently wrote about different approaches to matching Pantone colors on production inkjet. We got an interesting note from one of our UK readers, David Albin, who suggested that forcing

“Can You Print This Pantone Color with Inkjet?” This is a question we hear over and over. Not just from customers, but from customer representatives, designers and sales people. And

Print manufacturers include print resolution in their machine specs. It is usually shown as dots per inch (DPI) e.g. 600 x 600 or 1200 x 1200, but you may also see different amounts for the process and cross process directions e.g.  600 x 480, particularly with high speed continuous devices.

Anilox coating systems apply a precisely measured and consistent level of coating to a printed surface. The process uses an anilox roll, which is a hard cylinder with metal core

…and what they can’t. I posted an open letter to inkjet OEMs last week and got some feedback on the specifications people find most important when comparing production inkjet technology.

What determines production inkjet print quality? This is a complex question which can’t be answered by simply looking at the published spec sheet for a device. Many OEM’s tout higher

Transaction print, transpromo and transitional print are all ways of talking about segments of the production print market that produce statements, invoices, letters, notices and other important customer communications. The

Discussion of the key performance indicators (KPIs) and segment definitions that matter when evaluating equipment for inkjet book printing.

Often people discuss inkjet print quality in terms of dots per inch and the number of colors available, but this is just a small slice of what goes into the discussion of print quality. To get at the heart of quality in the age of ever smaller print heads with more densely packed nozzles, we need to look at the gray areas. Join us for a discussion of grayscale.

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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.

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.