Evaluation of jet performance and jet failure analysis is an ongoing and critical task during the product development phase of all inkjet systems.While jet quality is often assessed via visual inspection, these inspections return results that are subjective and difficult to quantify.During the development of a wide format inkjet printer aimed at the print shop market, jet quality analysis was being analyzed by a completely visual, laborious, and timeconsuming process that resulted in failure counts and a rudimentary categorization of failure modes.The decision to move from subjective assessment to the use of an automated alternative was motivated by a desire to track the performance of a wider variety of jet quality measures on continuous quality scales rather than with the current manual process that only yields attribute classification and pass/fail counts.A scanner-based image quality system was identified based on proven prior experience and an open architecture that allowed for measurement method customization. The application was developed, tested, and put to use measuring not only the jet quality attributes that had been evaluated via visual assessment, but it also broadened the scope of the analytical process to include attributes and variables that were of great interest that could not be tracked using the previous process.This paper details the use of a commercially available scanner-based image quality measurement system in the automation of jet quality analysis. Application details and the results from system verification and qualification will be presented.
Dana C. Aultman, Randy Dumas, Tal Salomon, "Automating Jet Quality Analysis Using a Scanner-Based System" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies (NIP20), 2004, pp 378 - 382, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2004.20.1.art00085_1