Category Archive

If you want to make good decisions about inkjet, you need to take a long hard look at your entire book of business. This post discusses the common issues that arise when decisions are made without proper analysis of all of a company’s print volume – whether they think it can transition to inkjet or not.

Mark Bale provides an overview of the important differences in inkjet ink characteristics that come from various components such as resins, solvents, humectants and surfactants. With an understanding of these components and how OEMs use them to differentiate their inks, you’ll be better informed next time you have a conversation with your supplier.

Overview and analysis of the RISO T2 Twin-Engine Cut Sheet printer scheduled for controlled release later this year with 10 units currently available in the U.S. and general availability in January 2019. Comparison to VarioStream i300 and Delphax elan 500 sheet fed devices.

Mark Bale provides a deep dive into the differences in the approach to colorant carrier in the main categories of inkjet ink: aqueous, oil, hot-melt and UV curable. Ink chemistry matters and different approaches are better suited to specific applications.

Karen Weil, Director of Procurement for IWCO Direct, shares her impressions of Inkjet Insight’s market research on paper supply and her approach to securing paper for her client’s projects.

Inkjet Insight will be all over PRINT 18. On Monday October 1, at 12:00 authors Elizabeth Gooding and Mary Schilling will have a book signing for the release of the

First in a new series by Mark Bale discussing the topic of inks. This post explains the chemistry and colorant options available in the production print market. Our aim is to give a non-exhaustive insight in to material differences and how they impact print quality and color.

John Seymour shares a humorous post on the accomplishments of Albert Munsell and his contributions to the field of color management. Provides an overview of the leading sources of color management theory and an approachable way to understand three-dimensional color space.

Managing your workflow resources, understanding potential bottlenecks and the corresponding job attributes that will trigger them is essential to meeting SLA performance expectations in an inkjet environment. Tim Cooper of NCP Solutions, an OSG Company, provides expert insight on identifying constraints and measuring for success.

Mike Dietz, Executive Creative Director with IWCO Direct discusses best practices in designing for digital and approaches to customer education on the wonders of production inkjet.

Tim Cooper, Chief Enterprise Architect from Harland Clarke Holdings Company shares insights in a two-part series on defining, measuring and modelling workflow capacity for production inkjet printing. This article is focused on understanding the components of workflow and how it may impact capacity.

The growth markets for production inkjet lie in the segments where creatives hold sway. If you want to grow pages in these markets, you will need to get designers on your side.

Delphax Solutions Inc. (DSI), was created in August, 2017 by Air T to design, manufacture, and sell printing equipment starting with the elan product line. The company shared news of the new organization and strategic direction.

The Inkjet Insight team has dedicated a lot of its recent editorial activity towards understanding the impact of mill closures and paper supply issues on the production inkjet market. In addition to interviewing print service providers, equipment manufacturers, mills, and paper merchants, we also sent out a survey to our audience in order to validate what we were learning.

In the past, when new graphic arts technology has been introduced, the first response has often been, “It will never be good enough to replace ‘X.’” It was said that offset printing would never be good enough to replace letterpress. Web offset would never be good enough to replace sheetfed. Toner-based digital print would never be good enough to replace offset. The introduction of production inkjet was no different.

Sheet-fed presses have traditionally addressed high image quality requirements, short runs, substrate flexibility, larger format applications such as folder or posters, expanded color gamut, and value-added enhancements. This article discusses the market opportunity for sheet-fed inkjet presses, a range of devices, and opportunities.

Last week in Color Management as Crayon Space, I posed an impossible task: to arrange crayons in a line according to their color. Color can’t be arranged in a line because it’s three-dimensional. This post will discuss the three dimensions of color: hue angle, lightness value, and chroma/saturation. Again, we’ll play with crayons and some real-life experiments.

Chris Lynn continues his packaging series with a look at what has held inkjet back in the label market and, by extension, what has caused even slower adoption in the rest of the packaging market – and how these limitations are being overcome.

Andy Gordon discusses ways that print providers and their print buying customers can work together to reduce the disruptive impact of paper scarcity. More planning, more testing and more emphasis on strategy can lead to shared success.

John Seymour joins Inkjet Insight for part one of a series discussing color management using crayons as a guide.  Part one poses the challenging of creating a linear organization of a non-linear concept.