Category Archive

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.

Print OEMs need to understand that, for the foreseeable future, they will be judged as much on their paper program as the print technology they offer to the market.

Chris Lynn explores the reasons why toner and inkjet account for under 10% of the volume of labels printed last year and why the label sector of the packaging market was the first to adopt digital technologies despite the uphill battle.

My last post, Paper Supply and Strategic Planning, continued our coverage of paper shortage in the U.S. market. This post offers suggestions to mills and paper merchants on how they can help print providers navigate this difficult time.

Robert Clark of IWCO Direct discusses their experience migrating from conventional print to production inkjet. The pros far outweighed the cons, but that doesn’t mean the journey to inkjet came without a learning curve.

Inkjet Insight is closely watching the challenging paper shortage in the U.S. market. Our team  has covered different aspects of this topic from pulp trends to impacts to the supply chain. Most recently, we have been interviewing subject matter experts throughout the paper supply chain to gain a holistic view of the market. It’s clear that the tight paper market is driving frustration and change and it’s incumbent on participants throughout the supply chain to consider how to solve this challenge.

Last week Zanders GmbH issued a press release regarding the continued restructuring process for the company. The release included a sentiment that we don’t often hear in these types of announcements: optimism.

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.

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.

The package printing climate is changing, and waves of new technology are breaking on the shores of short-run work, but the packaging mainland is mostly unaffected so far. Chris Lynn offers insights on the packaging market for inkjet.

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.