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.

Don’t make designers guess about color matching or papers that work well with your press. Create tools to give designers and print buyers an objective understanding of your press quality on different media. 

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.

Mary Schilling discusses the opportunity for sheet-fed inkjet including the traditional barriers of paper, pricing and image quality. The analysis discusses the requirements for inkjet to compete with commercial offset printing.

Inkjet is a complement to toner and flexo in the label market according to Marco Boer of I.T. Strategies. Marco discusses the relative productivity, ownership cost and simplicity of inkjet for labels and takes a skeptical look at label personalization. When it comes to justifying inkjet for labels, think “burst volumes.”

Dust and Downtime Uncoated papers with uneven surface formation can generate dust. Dust can buildup on paper transports and print heads causing jet-outs, reduced print quality, increased maintenance costs and downtime. If dust concentration is very high, it can have health consequences for workers – more downtime!

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.

Mark Hunt of Standard Finishing encourages companies evaluating inkjet presses to look at the full process from back to front to ensure compatibility.

More inkjet presses can now print on offset gloss – but test carefully. The ink may adhere just fine, but gloss stocks can slip more easily (especially roll-fed) so check registration of fine images and rich blacks.

Steve Welkley discusses the approach that Xerox has taken to make production inkjet accessible to a wider range of companies.

Bergisch Gladbach/Little Chute WI, 9 August 2018. Due to increased costs for raw materials such as pulp and chemicals as well as for energy, Zanders will increase the price of

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.

Most aqueous inkjet devices will have plugging and registration issues with rich black text at 9pt or smaller. If you need fine print, test the density of plain K ink and minimize the use of CM&Y. Some OEMs offer high density black.

Marco Boer discusses the components of the “Other” category within I.T. Strategies’ research reports and why they are some of the most valuable pages for inkjet production.

Press Release from Global Graphics announcing that they have received the Printing Industries of America InterTech™ Technology Award for Innovation for their ScreenPro™ inkjet technology.

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.

SCREEN Partners with EFI to Enable Fiery Digital Front End Integration with EQUIOS Workflow KYOTO, Japan and FREMONT, California — July 24, 2018 — Screen Graphic Solutions Co., Ltd. (SCREEN