Commercial printing is the last vestige of the analog era: a 400 billion industry that has barely been touched by the digital revolution. Is this industry finally ready to yield? Or will the digital transformation of the printing industry continue to elude its pursuers? Is there a “killer app” that will blow this market open? If so, what are its key enablers? Will inkjet, xerography and liquid electrophotography all compete in this space? Does the Internet complement - or compete with - commercial digital printing? Lastly, what's the big deal - who needs it anyhow?

We have characterized the effect of 1 ppm of ozone at 50 % RH and 23°C on dye-based and pigmented inkjet images, on chromogenic, and on silver black-and white images on resin coated paper in dark storage. Prints in albums were evaluated unprotected and in polyethylene page protectors (PP) and sleeves (S). In this work, we evaluated the effect of ozone on density, colorimetry, and physical appearance.The primary effect of ozone was density loss. Mounting prints in an album minimizes the effect of ozone on inkjet prints. Sleeves or page protectors provide additional, protection against the effect of ozone. We recommend this additional protection for long-term storage of inkjet prints in albums.

This talk is about “The Chemical Toner Technology and The Future” and its brief history, difficulty, breakthrough technology and potentials.Although chemically processed toner seemed to be more suitable than melt-mix and crush method, chemically processed toner such as suspension polymerization toner was not launched for a long time. The first reason is its difficulty of charge control and secondly poor blade cleaning applicability. Huge investment for chemical toner plant is also high barriers for hardware companies.But at the end of 90's, several powerful industries began to produce various types of chemical toners because of their technology breakthrough such as charge control improvement, micro encapsulation method establishment, shape control process and smaller particle toner manufacturing process improvement, color oil-less capability realization and so on. One of the most dominant chemically processed toner is suspension polymerization toner from Nippon Zeon and Canon and the second dominant one is emulsion aggregation method toner from Konica and Fuji Xerox.The share of chemical toner is still low compared with the conventional methods toners but considering their much higher potentials of super high print quality for graphic arts, ultimate transfer efficiency, relatively environmental advantage for CO₂ reduction and other superior properties of their future possibilities, the volume of the production will increase explosively in near future.

Additives are identified that greatly reduce the fade of dye-based images on porous media. A series of additives were topically applied to commercial porous media that was then printed on with commercial dye-based ink sets. Significant differences in dye fade were observed upon simple ambient exposure under office lighting conditions. Non-yellowing compounds were identified which significantly slowed the rate of color loss of the prints, provided even fade over all colors screened, and introduced no discoloration on unprinted media surfaces.

It will be safe to say that most material that's meant for communication is now created digitally. In my talk, I will start with a subset of this communication process, which is the printing of full-color material, and then converge on a subset of this, which is “production color digital printing”.One way to characterize the various needs of making color printed pages is by the size of the job, that is, how many pages need to be printed. Color jobs needing one to, say, 20 pages are commonly printed using desktop printers. Color jobs ranging from 20 to, say, 100 pages are printed using convenience walk-up printers. For color jobs with more than 100 pages, a more centralized, “production” printer is usually required. The attributes that differentiate these classes of printers are speed and the ability to reliably produce the volume of pages needed from multiple endusers.Traditionally, the need of production color printing has been satisfied by technologies like offset and gravure, which are dependent on printing plates as masters. This had caused two important limitations. One: the jobs had to be medium to long run length, as the cost of the plates and the time to burn plates and set up the press had to be amortized over the job, and two: one could only print static information.The introduction of the first high-speed digital color printers, actually within three days of each other, in 1993 by two relatively unknown companies at that time - Indigo and Xeikon - brought the promise of both short runs and variable printing for production color printing. The approaches couldn't be more different or more innovative! The Indigo E-Print 1000 was based on liquid toner, intermediate transfer, four-cycle imaging and cut-sheet paper, whereas the Xeikon DCP-1 was based on dry toner, direct transfer, tandem imaging and web paper. Both were clean sheet designs, as opposed to being leveraged from an existing platform. Hundreds of these printers are still operating in customer sites, and variants of the design are still offered for sale.In the rest of my talk, I will describe what I feel are the ideal attribute set for color digital production printing, and map into that how the attributes of printers have evolved during the past ten years. I will also attempt to project how these attributes are likely to evolve during the next ten years.

Digital Print reduces the production time of jobs drastically–at least in the expectations! How can short production times be achieved? Not only the print process must be very fast, but also the entire process from the generation of a document till the finished product must be optimized. Prepress and postpress equipment must work seamlessly together with the printing device to make use of synergies. Open standards like JDF for automation and easy communication can help. Integrated workflow solutions are the subject of this presentation. How can the production costs be reduced by automation of the process, how flexible is an integrated process and how does it fit into the different environments are some question which should be addressed.Colour Digital Print was focused during the last years mainly on short run colour, but this changes step by step. More and more requirements are coming up to differentiate from Offset. Due to the bad economy even in Offset prices are reduced for short runs. To be competitive and gain market share it is necessary to offer workflows in digital print, which enables the owner to offer new products or services and to produce fast and – more or less - without waste.

Today all documents that carry intrinsic value contain one or more security design features. Applications of security printing range from banknotes, passports and ID documents, to checks, lottery tickets and gift vouchers. Dramatic growth in product counterfeiting has also lead to more attention to the packaging of fraud -sensitive goods. It is clear that these markets have different demands, yet they share a common goal: to make life difficult for the counterfeiter through design complexity and authenticity verification features.Today, we also notice an ever-increasing interest from the security printing industry in the developing technologies for digital printing. This interest includes both opportunity as well as risk-assessment. An overview of existing and emerging technologies will be placed in comparison with the current practices for the production of security documents and brand protection. The various parameters (ink, substrate, and design) of digital printing and their relationship to the specific needs and concerns of the security printing industry will be discussed.

The common issues are reviewed that arise when an operation seeks to gain efficiencies and combine offset and electrophotographic order processing, prepress, and finishing operations. Primary reasons for changing workflows are covered, along with practical considerations and cultural factors that need to be taken into account in any merged operation.

Extremely high-resolution images have been obtained by an electrophotographic imaging system using liquid toner. This system includes a high-resolution Laser Scanning Unit (LSU) with a 2,540 dpi resolution, and an image transfer system that does not use electrical energy. We examined the characteristics of high-resolution image creation, in particular the relationship with laser beam focusing and laser power to obtain the optimized parameter value of the LSU. The image pattern from this system was confirmed to be accurate according to the resolution. Furthermore, an examination of the noiseless transferability of “shearing transfer” showed the accuracy of the created image was due not only to the development process, but also to the transfer process. We attempted to print a full-color image with this system, and obtained a real 2,540 dpi color image, which is equal in quality to that produced by offset printing.

For digital printing to be successful in the label market, the technology needs to include all the converting flexibility for which narrow web in-line presses are well known. The technology needs to be truly integrated into converting equipment that the label industry currently uses. It needs to have the capability to lay down spot colors and varnishes, diecut, strip the waste, foil stamp, etc. A successful solution will treat digital printing just like another printing process – and not have to run many off-line operations to finish converting the label. The key is to provide digital printing as added flexibility on current converting equipment, allowing it to print an even wider variety of labels. Thus eliminating the investment of off-line technology to provide the low-cost answer to short runs and variable information.This paper will describe an example of how digital inkjet printing can be combined with laser finishing to satisfy the needs of the label converters. It will address the technology of the combination of inkjet printing and laser finishing. It will also address the production economics and discuss the benefits of producing the complete label in one pass through the press.