Eric Wiesner of HP provides the 4th installment in our print head strategy series. Wiesner provides some history on HPs print head developments and highlights the factors that drove HP to select thermal print heads for their production devices in the graphics market.

Despite what can be seen as very healthy growth rates, the production inkjet market could be growing considerably faster. Let’s look at the barriers to inkjet growth and how we as an industry can work together to tear them down.

Energy efficiency is a big deal – particularly in application-segments with high coverage requiring intensive drying power. Some manufacturers have done an exceptional job of redirecting heat from other areas of the device to drying chambers, thereby reducing energy needed for drying and also reducing energy needed to cool the print engine itself. Many OEMs offer a standard drying option plus variations available based on need. Make sure you are asking about, and testing with, the drying options that are most suitable to your application segment. 

Marco Boer of I.T. Strategies talks about the component parts of various OEM’s aqueous inkjet programs that are enabling inks to “stick it’ on challenging surfaces with a particular focus on aqueous coatings.

This the first in a series of articles by Mary Schilling that will drill down on specific print quality metrics, what they mean, how they are measured and what factors in your printing process can affect them. Optical Density is one of the important quality metrics that can be objectively measured and it can be correlated to a number of other quality metrics.

Ricoh today announces the development of a new ink technology. This new ink will soon be brought to market as an additional option to current and future clients on the Ricoh Pro™ VC60000 continuous feed inkjet printing platform.

Another perspective on Piezo. Video ion Ricoh’s selection of piezoelectric print heads for their production inkjet devices. Mike Herold, Director of Global Marketing for Ricoh Inkjet Solutions, provides his quick take on the science behind piezo and how it delivers benefits in the form of reliability and efficiency.

Part two in the series “Essential Services” by Andrew Gordon will discuss activities to drive customer acceptance and revenue including testing, certifications, and business development. There are a lot of services that go into getting an inkjet implementation up and running smoothly. Planning for them in advance helps to avoid surprises and take advantage of OEM buying incentives.

Andrew Gordon discusses the range of services to consider before, during and after a production inkjet implementation that will help to ensure your success with inkjet in the shortest time. (Part 1 of 2 in series)

Marco Boer discusses the surprising array of labor and technology trends that are putting pressure on commercial printing enterprises to invest in production inkjet technology. Includes charts, graphs, trends and the insight decoder ring from Marco.

Mary Schilling dives into the process for creating inkjet treated, coated and hybrid papers that are treated, yet perform like a coated paper. Some mills describe these as a “coated feel” paper and list them as coated, while others list them as treated (which is technically more accurate.)

Contributing author Chris Lynn provides and insightful explanation of “Apparent Resolution”: what it means, how it came to be and whether or not it matters for your application segment when evaluating an inkjet press.

Video interview with Eric Weisner, General Manager of HP PageWide Industrial. Eric provides an overview of HP in the book market, specifically color books. He describes the market as a “key focus area” for HP and says that HDNA heads were fundamentally designed to be able to produce color books.

Elizabeth Gooding, President and Co-founder of Inkjet Insight, will be joining an esteemed group of industry experts in New York City during the first week of February as a judge for the 2018 HP Inspiration Awards Americas. The judging will occur on February 8th at the New York offices of Publicis Groupe. There are 14 awards across both Labels & Packaging and General Commercial Printing segments.

Three weeks into 2018 and it’s already been a bad year on the information security front. On January 3^rd Google’s Project Zero team reported a security flaw affecting any devices that use chips from Intel, AMD or ARM – which pretty much covers most personal computers, tablets and servers. There are two main vulnerabilities, “Meltdown” and “Spectre” that sound like they were named after Bond villains.

We got a lot of good feedback on Elizabeth’s post on Peanut Butter and Workflow so I thought I would keep the sandwich metaphor going. When using pre-coatings and post-coatings with inkjet, you are creating an inkjet sandwich served on a paper plate. Each layer of the sandwich can make the ink spread and dry unevenly if not managed before profiling, creating a soggy sandwich.

Mary Schilling, head of print quality analysis with Inkjet Insight, will be joining the opening panel at the Unleashing Print conference at Dscoop 2018. Mary will be discussing considerations when designing for inkjet and overcoming color ink and graphics challenges.

Press Release New Zanjet Coated Inkjet Papers for high-speed inkjet Zanders has announced the official launch of Zanjet, a coated inkjet paper available in a Gloss and Silk finish. Paper

A workflow is a workflow whether or not it is automated. Your process for making a peanut butter sandwich can be a workflow. There are lots of different kinds of software that can be used to automate different processes, and those processes can be considered workflows, but that doesn’t make the software “a workflow solution.” Many excellent software vendors throw a wide array of their software solutions into a big bucket called “print workflow automation” and that makes it a very messy fishing expedition for buyers to find a solution for the particular aspect of a print process that they are trying to automate.

The issue of data security is so pervasive that it has moved from an IT and boardroom discussion to become the topic of movies and television shows. More than 7 billion records were exposed through breaches in just the first nine months of 2017, a jump of over 300 percent from the prior year. Five of the top breaches in 2017 were among the largest ten breaches of all time.  With over five million records lost or stolen every day, protecting businesses and consumers from data breaches is a top concern among executives in all industries. While there is a tendency to think of data breaches in terms of the web and digital initiatives, security is no less critical for printing operations.