A variety of error sources can produce print quality defects in the Drop on Demand Printers. The misalignment between drops (from same or different color) produces bad line reproduction, or shadows in the text or images. The misalignment errors have many different sources (color to color, bidirectional movements, mechanical errors, etc). The systems used to correct those misalignments were implemented since the very beginning of the printer market, and almost all of them are based in print some features (patterns) design to isolate the error over the output media, measure those features and extract the correction needed to compensate it.1 Those alignments were time and paper consuming.This paper will present a new strategy based in the general approach of the PQ defect to correct the misalignments of the Inkjet Printers with less demanding in time and paper wasted.The system use a single pattern that is measure to obtain geometrical positions of certain marks in it. The positions recorded are mathematically treated to isolate and obtain the error produce by every source of error, this error value are use by the printing system to correct it and produce the optimal output quality.The advantage of this system can be applied to other printing system based in multiple writing systems (inkjet, laser, etc.)
Jorge Castaño, "General Alignment Strategy of InkJet Devices" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies (NIP19), 2003, pp 516 - 519, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2003.19.1.art00016_2