The annual sale of coated printing paper in Japan was more than 7 million tonnes in 2007, but there has been a continuous decline year on year and it is expected to be less than 6 million tonnes in the current year, 2012. In particular, the domestic production of coated printing paper has decreased noticeably whereas the amount imported has increased six-fold in 5 years. Our analyses of imported lightweight coated (LWC) and A2 grade paper showed that the imported LWC had higher opacity, lower brightness, and comparable printing qualities to domestic products, while the imported A2 grade had a higher ash content (= heavier coated weight) and it contained mechanical pulp, but exhibited equivalent printing qualities. Therefore, it can be suggested that domestic manufacturers should continue to reduce production costs and should promptly realign some of their old-fashioned business customs to cope with international competition.

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The image quality in electrophotography systems has been improving by smaller toner particle sizes and improvements in equipment performance. The first stage of this system is simply copying. Improvements in digital exposure technology allowed these systems to produce original print images, such as the current printing systems. The image quality in electrophotography has advanced to a similar quality level as offset printing. Furthermore, this system can provide added value during the production of print images, such as UV images and gloss-controlled images.

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The use of electronic money based on digital data is spreading in today's society thanks to recent advances in information technology. In Japan, electronic payment systems such as Edy, Suica, PASMO, nanaco, and WAON have become increasingly popular, and they are used widely for making small payments. This study aims to assess the influence of the proliferation of electronic money on present currency by investigating the status of electronic money usage, the amount of currency in circulation, and other factors. The results indicated that the proliferation of electronic money influences the circulation of notes only slightly, while its effect on coins with smaller denominations is non-trivial.

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This paper discusses the potential substitution of paper media with digital media from the perspective of usability and legibility through a comparison of the characteristics of digital media and paper media. Various media have been digitized throughout the progress of information technology. Therefore, it is important that digitized media be improved in terms of their usability and costs. Current paper media are not digitized and hence they have low usability, high costs, and poor display qualities. Recent digital media such as tablet PCs, e-books, and smartphones have been developed using advanced information technologies, and thus they may substitute for paper media. This study investigated digital media from three perspectives, i.e., their physical characteristics, screen display size, and screen resolution. Our investigation and analysis showed that paper media cannot be substituted with recent digital media in the near future. However, some digital media have noteworthy features that are comparable with paper media. These digital media features are their high-resolution screens, large screen size, and writable screens. In the near future, new products or services that focus on user experience will be developed by integrating digital media and paper media.

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Electronic media give us greater access to vast amounts of information than ever before. It has often been said that digital technologies will make paper, which is the standard analog medium, outdated. Digital technologies often eliminate the need for paper, but at other times they create a greater demand for it. For example, there is a growing demand for office paper. By contrast, the demand for newspaper and printing paper has plateaued. Paper supports certain human activities better than the digital alternatives do. For example, paper provides a considerably more comfortable and barrier-free interface for its users than electronic displays. In fact, people prefer to print documents on paper when they want to read them. Thus, the old-fashioned technology of paper will continue to thrive because of its user-friendly nature. The balance between the use of paper and electronic media may change depending on the demands of users, but it is important to consider how old and new technologies can work in synchronization.

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Printing Service LCCO₂e is schematized during the process of the set-in of Carbon Footprint of Products and then developed as Printing Service Integrated LCA to evaluate not only CO₂e emission but also other impact categories such as natural recourses, energy drain, waste disposal and so forth. While some printers try to start calculating environmental load for printed matters, they can select either one of two quantification methods which are approved to be utilized; one is "allocation method" based on corporate activity based manner and the other is "cumulative method" based on product based manner. LCA study usually does not allow organizations to compete each other by numerical number of environmental load, but most of print-buyers or consumers might accept everything for what it is whenever they have a look. A case study of paper package production is attempted to be validated by the scale of CO₂e emission for long⁄mid⁄short-run jobs to understand actual difference in practice. In conclusion, printers ideally can utilize allocation method for calculating organizational load to reduce corporate environmental load and cumulative method for calculating the load from actual product production. It is significant for all levels of printers to be able to utilize both allocation and cumulative methods for reducing existing environmental load and taking future outside pressure off from print-buyers to improve corporate and product performance.

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The AM (halftone) screening technology used widely up till now in the printing industry expresses gradations by adjusting dot size. In recent years, CTP has been introduced and with advances in printing technology including screening methods, printed matter with high image quality, high resolution, and high added value has become the norm. Advances in FM screening technology are regarded with particular interest due to its high image quality and stable print quality. FM screening technology represented by dithering and error diffusion that gradations are expressed using random dot arrangements. Consequently, the moirë and rosette patterns characteristic of AM screening do not arise, but it nevertheless has a rough granular quality. A further problem is that, since the dots are small, it must be changed significantly for application in conventional printing environments with stringent printability conditions. In this research, we propose a new hybrid screening method combining the advantages of both conventional FM screening and halftone. Specifically, we carried out binarization to convert the multi-level grayscale value pixels of the grayscale image to the number of black pixels of the binary image with halftone cells using halftone dots, then prepared a different FM image from the conventional FM screening image with arrangement of the black pixels using a chessboard pixel arrangement and random numbers. In addition, the isolated small black pixels which are evenly distributed in conventional FM images were consolidated into cluster patterns by a series of pattern conversion processes. Finally, we reduced roughness and applied image quality correction to achieve a new hybrid screening method with improved image quality.

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