It has taken years for ink jets to move from the laboratory to the home, office and commercial workplace. Commercial ink jet printing literally began on the floor with Miliken's carpet printers in the 1970's, but it was not until HP's ThinkJet that enabled everyone to inexpensively print from PC's did ink jet printing become a common term. Now we are seeing many markets utilizing a wide variety of ink jets in ways unthinkable 30 years ago. These applications include every form of graphics arts printing, product decoration and even fabrication of products and components.This presentation will discuss recent advances in drop-ondemand piezo ink jet technology with particular emphasis on designs intended for dispensing functional fluids rather than printing inks. Recently new methods of constructing printheads have been introduced and these tools are enabling new applications in areas as diverse as biotechnology, nanofluid development and flexible organic electronics. We know from looking at billboards and address labels that ink jets produce valuable graphic arts products, but it remains to be seen if ink jets can move from industrial and university labs into volume manufacturing of products such as displays and biochips.

Bonny Lhotka will present her work and the year long research project exploring UV printers for fine art. She, Dorothy Krause and Karin Schminke visited nearly a dozen manufacturers' locations to create experimental mixed media artwork. In this paper, she discusses the unique opportunities UV flatbed offer to fine artists, as well as their unique requirements for manufacturers. Appropriate substrates, features, and the opportunities to leverage white ink are evaluated, as well as suggestions to address the high cost of ownership for these capable devices.

The tandem color engines have entered the mainstream of electrophotographic color technologies. High durability and high stabilization in repeated electrophotographic cycles are the important properties for the organic photoreceptor to meet this trend. Therefore we have developed an organic photoreceptor having a protective layer, coated on the surface of a conventional organic photoreceptor. Assuming that the protective layer should possess both the abrasion resistance and the sufficient charge transport ability, a protective layer containing fine rigid particles was developed to achieve those requirements. Furthermore, we have developed the coating technology suitable for making the protective layer on the organic photoreceptor surface. This newly developed organic photoreceptor was used in Ricoh Aficio AP3800C launched into market in September 2001 and has been applied to other color engines of Ricoh since then. Here we introduce an outline of the technologies adopted in the new organic photoreceptor with the high durability and stability.

The digital printing of art reproductions and original digital art has blossomed into a major application for water based ink jet printing. Canvas, art paper, textiles, photo paper and specialized art media have evolved over the last decade along with printers and ink technology. I will review some of these developments and the current state of the science of ink jet art reproduction and digital art. With the development of higher resolution printers for UV curable ink jet printers and dedicated textile printers a new set of tools are becoming available to the artist and publisher. The impact of these developments and their potential to continue the rapid growth in this field will be discussed in this paper.

The high performance of filed emission from well-aligned carbon nanotubes has been achieved by optimizing the thickness of an MgO coating layer on the nanotubes. It has been clarified that an MgO layer as thin as 2 nm degrades the emission properties and a thicker MgO layer does not improve the properties effectively. The most stable emission as low as 9% for 8 hrs with the lowest turn-on voltage of ∼116 V is obtained for the thickness of 10 nm. The 10 nm-MgO coated nanotubes also exhibit a uniform emission from the whole area of nanotubes. The theoretical calculation of the potential distribution around the emission sites supports the existence of this optimum thickness.

The issue of color is now receiving considerable attention in the applications of imaging technology. It is difficult to reproduce the original color of subject in conventional imaging systems, and it obstructs the applications of visual communication systems in telemedicine, electronic commerce, and digital museum. Recently, the color videos, still-images, and prints are reproduced with significantly better quality than before, but there still remain limitations imposed by RGB trichromatic system. To breakthrough the limitation of RGB 3-primary systems, “Natural Vision” system has been developed aiming at an innovative visual communication technology, which enables high-fidelity color reproduction, based on spectral information. The experimental multispectral systems for both still-image and video have been elaborated and shown following features of spectrum-based scheme; a) Highly accurate color reproduction is possible with multispectral imaging, even under different illumination environment. b) Extended color gamut can be reproduced by multiprimary color displays. c) The influence of observer metamerism, which is considered as a cause of color disagreement between different media, can be reduced by the spectral color reproduction. d) The quantitative spectral attributes of object, useful for the analysis or the recognition of object, are captured and preserved. In addition, the effectiveness of the system has been demonstrated through experiments in the application fields, such as medicine, digital archives, color printing, electronic commerce, and computer graphics.

High-quality electrophotographic applications demand a photoconducting element that is “perfect” in many aspects:1. defect-free, almost to the submicrometer level,2. environmentally insensitive, and3. possessing a well-defined photosensitivity that matches the electrophotographic rendering process.The charge generation layer is typically coated from a preformed pigment dispersion. The stability, quality, and composition of that dispersion critically influence the production of that “perfect” photoconducting element.This work describes the development of Newtonian, colloidally stable, ultrasonic-insensitive, charge generation layer dispersion compositions with instantly tunable photosensitivity. These dispersions enable robust photoconductor manufacturing processes and provide instantly accessible photospeeds ranging from 0.05 to 1.0 cm²/ergs (500–100 V photodischarge).

Billions of pictures go unprinted or cause consumer dissatisfaction due to their poor image quality and the inability of users to make simple enhancements that would render them satisfactory. This conclusion is true for applications such as digital photography, where high quality prints are desirable, and for digital documents where it would often be convenient to carry out in situ image processing of embedded pictures. By combining both traditional and non-traditional imaging tools, a simple yet highly effective overall image-enhancement methodology has been developed that is capable of placement everywhere a user interacts with a digital image, including a desk-top printing menu. The authors will describe the basic imaging principles used in the development of this practical methodology, from initial concept through to end-solution, and a demonstration will be given of typical user operation.

By combining the n-type organic field-effect-transistor (OFET) and the double-layered hole-transportable organic photoreceptor (or organic photoconductor: OPC), an optical-drive type OFET was achieved. In this device, the change of electric potential in the OPC is detected as the channel current of the OFET. This device showed the increase in the source-drain current by the laser irradiation (780 nm) under applied the gate voltage. On the other hand, the current did not change by the laser irradiation, when there was no gate voltage. These results indicated that this current increasing by laser irradiation was originates from the drive of the OPC. Furthermore, the current hysteresis by the charge storage at the interface between OPC and insulator was confirmed, and the erasure of such stored charges was achieved by applying a reverse gate bias.

Special printing technology that uses binocular parallax and enables viewers to perceive depth is increasing in popularity. In these systems, a high-resolution printout is overlapped by a special optical component, such as a lenticular board or a fly's eye lens. However, determining the best parameters for the optical components, such as the lens pitch and focal length, is not easy. A lot of trial and error is usually needed to make a prototype, which is expensive and time consuming. Moreover, an independent evaluation of the image quality of a 3D display system is difficult because it is hard to remove the influence from the image input system. A new solution to these problems is proposed in this paper. Virtual 3D lenses that have the same functions as real lenses were generated in a 3D space of a CG application by combining some basic objects, such as cylinders, spheres, and boxes. A still image, which was synthesized for integral photography in advance, was texture-mapped onto a box, and the image was observed using a virtual camera that moved horizontally and vertically through the virtual lenses mentioned above. We simulated a kind of integral photography that used two mutually perpendicular lenticular sheets using this method. The results indicated that the proposed method is applicable for designing and evaluating 3D display systems.