Topic

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.

Ricoh USA Inc. today announced the newest addition to its award-winning inkjet portfolio, the RICOH Pro VC70000, built to accelerate the transfer of offset print volumes to digital. The new continuous feed platform empowers commercial printers to produce quality applications, such as high-end catalogs and magazines, traditionally expected from offset presses. Additionally, Ricoh-developed inks enable up to 40 percent savings in paper costs while also expanding media support to offset-coated papers, untreated papers and more.

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.

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.

Not all presses will produce their top quality at top speed. Understand the impact of sheet size or web width, media type, ink coverage and actual production speed (not rated speed) on your achievable Images Per Minute (IPM). There are many other issues that impact overall productivity – but it starts at the press for each job.

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.

Software is a key component of efficient inkjet worfklow. Buying from the OEM may be the best option, but it pays to shop around. Most software types offered as part

This week I had the opportunity to attend the ribbon cutting ceremony at the new 225,000 square foot EFI innovation center in Londonderry New Hampshire. In his opening remarks Guy Gecht, CEO of EFI said “the future of packaging is inkjet printing” and based on EFI’s massive investment in this very impressive facility, they are ready to meet demand.

Eric Weisner, General Manager of HP PageWide Industrial Division on the drying options HP offers with their production inkjet line-up and the  speed, coverage and cost trade-offs to consider.

People are always trying to figure out how to get more value for less money. Designing an inkjet solution is no exception. But, here’s the thing, you need to be able to define what “value” is, and with inkjet it’s often about more than one thing. In this post, as always, we try to make it objective.

Elizabeth Gooding shares her insights on key software investments to deliver end-to-end workflows that meet customer needs, are scalable, and achieve production efficiency goals.

“Are Commercial Print and Inkjet gonna’ be a Thing?” That’s the question I asked Marco Boer of I.T. Strategies. Marco says a perfect storm of industry catalysts are likely to move commercial print organizations to consider the move to inkjet. But, it already is a thing.

Advances in inkjet technology and fluids are enabling production on a wider variety of paper grades and finishes. How does this impact the evaluation process for papers? What new variables must be considered when evaluating paper for particular application segments. Mary offered work-arounds for scarcity in the market and tips on finding and evaluating papers.

Shade is important to inkjet color reproduction as the paper’s shade shows through the ink and can shift the ink’s colorant when applied to the sheet. Paper shade can affect all values of highlight, mid-tone and shadow areas of print.

A very simple tool to allow you do do some “what if” analysis on how improvements in uptime, minimizing paper changes and other seemingly minimal improvements can impact your revenue over the course of the year. It adds up!