We use interior decorative materials for ceiling, wall covering and flooring applications of our houses. For ceiling and wall, we use wall covering materials such as “CLOTH” in general. After The World War Two, these materials have been widely used and the production and the shipment have been increasing along with economical growth in Japan. However, in these years, the type of wall covering materials has been changed. We have started to develop new wall covering materials, which are friendly to environment and safe in use for the applications as much as possible. The theme of new development is based upon the requirement of PL Law, TVOC and so on. In this review, we raise the issues such as current circumstances, manufacturing process and the most important one, the environmental issue of wall covering materials.

View full abstract

In recent years, the environmental pollutants are becoming injurious problems to our health which are discharged through the burning up and discard of the materials used in the processing of the building materials. Transfer printing in this review is featured with its characteristics to meet environmental requirements such as NON-VOC, NON-Poly vinyl chloride, and NON-formalin.

View full abstract

Rotary screen printing is widely used as a method to manufacture wallpaper. Wallpaper is an indoor material which forms living environment of residence along with other interior products such as curtain, carpet, furniture and so on. Rotary screen printing is an extremely good method to express color, embossment and texture of materials required for wallpaper. In this review, we are introducing our techniques and the latest movement of wallpaper manufactured by rotary screen printing which has now become one of the essential building materials in Japan.

View full abstract

To utilize DTP and CTP efficiency, DDCP should be the successor to the current wet proofing. To revolutionize the proofing system, it is required to match color by DDCP with that of the wet proofing, and to know how much color errors are acceptable in practical use. Once the acceptable tolerance is known, a measure could be derived that evaluates whether a system is acceptable without a visual evaluation. A psychophysical experiment was performed to define colorimetirically quantified acceptable tolerance. Four pictorial images and one synthetically generated gray-steps image were used as original images. Reproductions were made which included some color shifts in only one axis direction of CIELAB. Observers who are professional printing employees compared each reproduced image with the original, and evaluated whether it was acceptable or not. Using the Probit analysis, acceptable tolerance was derived from proportion of acceptability for a*±, b*±, and L*± directions respectively. From this analysis, it was found that tolerance for L*± and b*- directions was lager than that for the other directions. In addition, two equations were derived as the metrics. One was simply derived from the results, and the other was derived by taking repeatability and color reproduction errors of the printing system used in the experiment into consideration. Finally, performance of the equations was confirmed for the experimental results.

View full abstract

Next generation sheet-fed ink is expected to have very fast drying property to enable quick work and turn. Since the highly reactive varnish is needed to achieve this, it must be a key to control the catalytic activity of the drier to increase its latency, where the drier is inactive until the ink is printed on paper. Micro-encapsulation of the drier with a water-soluble shell looks the nearest approach to achieve this. And we think that the intended encapsulated drier will be feasible by controlling the affinity between the core and the water-soluble shell and controlling the solubility of the shell.

View full abstract

Near infrared ray absorbing dyes have absorption in near infrared region of 700-2000nm and have ability to convert light to heat or to absorb light selectively. So that those dyes have been applied for various uses because of such characteristics. In our company, we are in research and development of various phthalocyanine and cyanine compounds mainly for use of optical recording material (CD-R) and light-to-heat converting material of CTP as well as new uses. This paper introduces the preparation method and examples of phthalocyanine and cyanine compounds and then introduces several examples about uses of near infrared ray absorbing dyes.

View full abstract

In this paper we discuss about the color properties and color evaluation of printing ink. The color properties of printing ink highly depend on the organic pigment and could be evaluated with a printed matter. It is very important to evaluate the color as numerical value.

View full abstract