Knowledge Base

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Transaction, Transpromo, Transitional Printing – What Matters?

August 10, 2017

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

Inkjet Book Printing – What Matters?

In 2011, Cary Sherburne wrote an article about inkjet book printing at Webcom, one of the largest book printers in Canada, where she said: “As more high speed full-color inkjet

Understanding the Gray Areas of Inkjet – Grayscale

Often when people talk about the capabilities of an inkjet printer, they will discuss print quality in terms of dots per inch and the number of colors available, but this

Your Customer Education Checklist for Inkjet

We’ve provided a customer education checklist because we want you to make creating an inkjet customer education plan a priority. Creating a solid customer education plan has many potential benefits for

New Tool – Customizable Process Color Guide

Color matching tools are an important part of any inkjet customer education program, so we are continually adding tools to help you communicate with customers. Previously we provided a free

Understanding Linearization

The key to print quality and color management is controlling the migration of the ink into the paper. The size of the drops jetted along with the pattern which forms upon contact

RFP Checklist – Software Requirements

Many an inkjet evaluation has run aground in the murky waters of software requirements. I say murky because software requirements often aren’t as clear as hardware needs. If a piece

Inkjet Insight Tint Book

Pretty much everyone is familiar with the Pantone swatch / tint book which shows the CMYK, RGB and HTML values used to reproduce each swatch color, or tint, as accurately as possible in standard print and onscreen applications. The problem is that production inkjet is not really a “standard” print application. Read More

Proper Packaging of Design Files

Design files can be pretty complex. A typical file could contain hundreds or thousands of detailed elements such as font families, lines, vignettes plus drawn and linked elements such as logos and photos. These may be created in multiple formats housing extremely detailed dither and color data. Designers sometimes go to painstaking detail to create a particular effect. Read More

Setting Paper Evaluation Requirements

Before you start any paper trials, know what you’re finished product goals will be and design your trial around them. Paper evaluation needs to consider a broad array of issues beyond compatibility with a specific device. If you don't consider the big picture, you can waste a lot of time testing papers or miss out on opportunities to save money and improve quality. Read More

Understanding the TAPPI Roll Identifier

TAPPI is the technical arm of the American Pulp and Paper Association. They are an ANSI-Certified Standards development organization, and one of the standards that they have developed is the

RFP Checklist: Production Inkjet Requirements

Before you can effectively research your production inkjet options, you need to consider the features that are most important. That, of course, is dependent on the volumes you need to support, the types of applications those volumes represent and whether those volumes are existing business that needs to be transitioned or new business for your organization. Read More

Premium Customizable Fingerprint Files

Fingerprints are an indispensable way to help your customers understand the benefits of inkjet and the paper selected for a particular job. Read More

Understanding the “Two-Sided” Effect

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. Read More

Diagnosing Cross-Process Density Shifts

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. Read More

Setting Customer Expectations with a Fingerprint

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. Read More

RFPs, RFIs, RFQs and Cutting to the Chase

An in-house print operation at a large insurance organization may have very different requirements for soliciting bids for large equipment purchases than a privately-held, mid-sized printing firm. Read More

Stripes, Solids and Banding

February 22, 2017

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. Read More

Working with Thin Papers

February 16, 2017

Thin papers require more thought than their thicker kin because thin papers have much less fiber content. Read More

Working with Thick Papers

February 14, 2017

Thick papers can take on more ink volume and heat than their lighter weight brothers. Read More