Paper and Ink Technology Applied for High-speed Inkjet Production Printing

Abstract

A high-speed inkjet production printer which prints aqueous inks onto continuous feed-roll paper has been growing by enabling digital printing such as on-demand and variable outputs. For example, direct-mail, transaction and trans-promotion with small lots, personalized addressing and contents are provided with low cost paper and ink performing medium color printing quality.

Permeable papers with inks are used in these printing outputs reflecting inkjet principles, however, printing companies expect to print on offset coated paper for commercial printing as a natural requirement because it reduces costs remarkably. The penetration into the coated paper were observed which required more than one second, although the penetration was completed in several tens of milliseconds on the plain paper, and then the fixing and the drying of the inks were the issues in printing systems. To manage these issues, a resin in the ink is utilized to fix colorants, and moisturizing agents are eliminated from the ink which was conventionally applied in traditional inkjets to maintain the dehydration performance.

As a result, monochrome ink having above improvements enabled personal addressing onto pre-printed coated paper and enhanced the concealed postcards in the folded form for example. Furthermore, for the col or inks, when image density is high about more than 200 %, the system for pre-coating layer on the paper is introduced to coagulate ink colorants to avoid mixing and migrating of the printed dots. In the nearest future, ink is expected to print on coated paper and nonpermeable film materials with the system assistance, or the inkjet paper is expected to alternate coated paper in both price and quality.

Inkjet makers introduced 1200 dpi printers on drupa 2016 where the print quality has been improved al though it was single pass printing, and also presented the fixing technology onto nonpermeable media. Inkjet technology is supposed to stagnate around the beginning of the 21st century, inkjet is expected to innovate by facing the challenges in production printing market.