How to choose the right ink jet printer?

In recent years, ink-jet printing has become a hot spot in the printing industry. Ink-jet printers have emerged incessantly over time. How to choose a suitable ink-jet printer has become a major issue facing the printing industry.

From the point of view of the number of products sold, Pucci Solutions Inc. (a joint venture between ibm and Ricoh) is the undisputed leader – they have now sold nearly 200 digital presses to the transactional printing market; This was followed by Kodak. The company's versamark vl series of inkjet printers also achieved remarkable success in the transactional printing market.

From the current point of view, continuous inkjet color printers do not appear to have entered the printing and publishing market; in the field of book printing, only some bookshops wishing to change business models and reduce product inventory with publishing customers will choose inkjet printing. In the area of ​​newspaper printing, only a few international newspapers will use inkjet printers for digital production in small quantities in different countries.

Despite the late start of the ink jet printer, we believe it will speed up the printing and publishing market this year. Since this brings many benefits to users, it is necessary for them to learn how to choose an ink jet printer before making a purchase decision.

Substrates (paper) - Although many equipment manufacturers have stated that their high-speed sheetfed or web-fed ink jet printers can use aqueous inks to print on ordinary offset paper and achieve good quality, they actually use conventional printing. The material will cause the ink to penetrate into the fiber of the paper and continue to spread, which will lead to many problems in the printing process; at present, there are two ways to avoid this situation, one is the use of pre-treatment (invisible coating) Instead of paper, the paper is processed on the press.

The HP t300 press uses the former method; the Fuji jetpress 720 press uses an on-line pre-coating device to process the entire paper before printing.

There are many ways to pre-treat paper. HP Indigo presses use paper that has been treated with sapphire, and the company's indigo 4200 and 7200 presses are equipped with an in-line pre-coater.

The question is which one is better? The cost of paper pre-processing is undoubtedly high, and many publishers are only used to providing paper for printing companies, but they are not willing to pay extra for it. This may seem like a difficult problem to solve, but some researchers have begun to study the ink that can be used on standard offset printing substrates, which will lay the foundation for the widespread use of inkjet printers.

Dyestuffs or Pigments—Inkjet printers use dyes or pigments as the dye, but dye inks are cheaper. In general, dye inks are more suitable for printing more transactional documents, while pigment inks can bring better quality when printing images. Pages printed with dye inks look very flat, but there is the possibility of fading, so this ink is more often used on low-grade uncoated paper such as newsprint.