Print Quality Analysis

ScreenPro with PrintFlat technology reduces non-uniformity, commonly known as the inkjet smile. Source: Global Graphics Release from Issuing Company Cambridge UK, 10th July 2018: A new version of ScreenPro™, the

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.

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.

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.

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.

While the conversion of marketing collateral from offset to digital may not be high, the value for digitally printed collateral is often much higher than other applications, typically driven by shorter run lengths, versioning and personalization. This has created excellent revenue opportunities for commercial printers who specialize in this area.

In this installment of “Let Data Drive your Print Quality Comparisons” Mary Schilling discusses the importance of chroma, how it’s defined within the context of print quality analysis and differences between inkjet and offset.

Contributing author Chris Lynn provides and insightful explanation of “Apparent Resolution”: what it means, how it came to be and whether or not it matters for your application segment when evaluating an inkjet press.

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

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.

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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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.