Print Quality Analysis

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.

We got a lot of good feedback on Elizabeth’s post on Peanut Butter and Workflow so I thought I would keep the sandwich metaphor going. When using pre-coatings and post-coatings with inkjet, you are creating an inkjet sandwich served on a paper plate. Each layer of the sandwich can make the ink spread and dry unevenly if not managed before profiling, creating a soggy sandwich.

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.

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.