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.

Elizabeth asked David Murphy of HP PageWide Industrial what he thought customers should be considering and his first response was to say that customers should be taking a long term view – multiple years out. He said customers should be thinking in terms of the ability for the device to remain relevant as inkjet continues to evolve.

Not all presses will produce their top quality at top speed. Understand the impact of sheet size or web width, media type, ink coverage and actual production speed (not rated speed) on your achievable Images Per Minute (IPM). There are many other issues that impact overall productivity – but it starts at the press for each job.

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.

If your business case assumes that the OEM is responsible for all costs of transfer, installation and testing – make sure that’s in the contract. Account for cost to move other equipment, if applicable and factor in labor and cost of down-time on other devices during transition. Consider a clause to cover costs of delays. Hope for the best and cover yourself for the worst.

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.

Simple rule of thumb is that dots-per-inch matters for text while“apparent” resolution is important for continuous tone images – but will not give the same relative improvement to text. Both are important when evaluating inkjet presses and neither can be evaluated without viewing print samples.

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.

Software is a key component of efficient inkjet worfklow. Buying from the OEM may be the best option, but it pays to shop around. Most software types offered as part

This week, Steve Welkley, Vice President Production Inkjet Sales with Xerox, shares his perspective on some niche areas of the book publishing sector that he feels are a great fit

This week I had the opportunity to attend the ribbon cutting ceremony at the new 225,000 square foot EFI innovation center in Londonderry New Hampshire. In his opening remarks Guy Gecht, CEO of EFI said “the future of packaging is inkjet printing” and based on EFI’s massive investment in this very impressive facility, they are ready to meet demand.

Designing the way that materials and finished products will move through the plant is as important as designing software workflow. Paper handling for inkjet may be different from what you

Eric Weisner, General Manager of HP PageWide Industrial Division on the drying options HP offers with their production inkjet line-up and the  speed, coverage and cost trade-offs to consider.

People are always trying to figure out how to get more value for less money. Designing an inkjet solution is no exception. But, here’s the thing, you need to be able to define what “value” is, and with inkjet it’s often about more than one thing. In this post, as always, we try to make it objective.

Elizabeth Gooding shares her insights on key software investments to deliver end-to-end workflows that meet customer needs, are scalable, and achieve production efficiency goals.

Right now rates are still very low, but they are rising. The US Federal Reserve projects 3 more rate hikes in 2018. Even a small difference in terms can make

“Are Commercial Print and Inkjet gonna’ be a Thing?” That’s the question I asked Marco Boer of I.T. Strategies. Marco says a perfect storm of industry catalysts are likely to move commercial print organizations to consider the move to inkjet. But, it already is a thing.

Advances in inkjet technology and fluids are enabling production on a wider variety of paper grades and finishes. How does this impact the evaluation process for papers? What new variables must be considered when evaluating paper for particular application segments. Mary offered work-arounds for scarcity in the market and tips on finding and evaluating papers.