This article is a summary of the survey work by Japan Printing Machinery Association (JPMA) between 2015 and 2016. The survey work is focused on the trends of the Asian market on printing machinery. The markets of four countries, namely, China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, are investigated. The focus areas are: (1) the market trend of each country by published data, (2) the related regulations and import duties and its system, (3) a questionnaire survey on customers' intentions, and (4) an interview survey onsite. The markets of the 4 countries are growing and the demand for printing is increasing. However, the requirement of digital printing and automatic printing is significantly different for each country. The customers recognize that the Japanese machinery performs well. It is also clear that the customers wish that the Japanese manufacturer maintained contact with them. These results provide us hints to devise our strategy.

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Before the Japanese manga went global, it was adapted for each country. Even in the pirated editions, we can find specific adaptations in them, resulting from the need for printing. For example, the print style in which 4 pages are set into 1 page in China, and different craftsman who draw cover art for manga in Thailand. However, the most important problem to be solved was how to adapt manga, which involved reading from right to left, into the style of being read from left to right in languages such as English. This essay tells you how the book style of reading from right to left has become popular even in Western countries.

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Waterless offset printing is an environmentally friendly and cost effective printing technology. In Europe, waterless dedicated printers, such as Cortina for newspapers and label printers, are synergetic with the short make ready and waste saving benefit the waterless printing process provides. Furthermore, waterless printing is much more effective in printing with radiation curable inks, which are widely used in label and packaging applications in Europe.

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SMEs in Printing Industry Today have been well developed. It was growth significantly at Indonesia. Many new comers with SMEs scale focus on packaging industry, seems like home industry with limitation machine resources and budget. These researches try to develop and utilize some small machine that big industries just throw it. Based on SMEs capacity and budget, HAMADA is suitable for their production. This machine is small, low electricity consumption, cheap and easy to operate it. However this machine have weakness in oscillating ink roll system. This weakness of this machine made this machine not possible produces high quality full color printing (CMYK). Although this machine rolls system suitable with full color print, it couldn't optimal in full color print. This system model of oscillating is hanging on the top of frame. It without any lock up and adjuster, just put on the top. When the diameter of roll reduces, or the connecting shaft vibration, it give impact with the quality of printing itself significantly become worse. So in other hand this machine could not print in full color (separation). Hamada is good machine, usually it used for monochrome print, for the SMEs need, this machine should be capable to separation print (full color). We try to develop and innovate this oscillating roll system, with some research in order to improve this machine capability and value. This system development help the SMEs could production and print in high quality as the Market needs. Hopefully with this new system development, this machine can help and increase SMEs printing quality and this machine itself become more valuable.

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Keeping our environment clean become a key challenge and responsibility in which the printing industry could play a major role. An aggressive action has been taken to meet this challenge by implementing in more sustainable print activities. In addition to this, many technological innovations such as ink chemistries, printing process efficiencies and new business models has been introduced. Although issues pertaining environmental protection within printing industry differ at local, national and international levels, it is imperative to have a common ground on how to promote environmental protection in the printing industry. The aim of this article is to present an idea by acknowledging the diversity that exists in the offset lithographic printing industry. With the rapid advancement in technology today, it is hoped that it will become a starting point for practicing environmental protection. This proposition is intended as a tool to stimulate ideas about potential opportunities for reducing wastes and emissions in printing organization, and reducing associated costs.

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In recent times, reading on an electronic display device such as a tablet computer has become popular. One of the typical document formats, the PDF, is also used for printing prepress work flows and standardized as PDF⁄X-1a. This application requires quality of contents, and the highest-quality materials consisting pages need to be packed in a PDF. Although electronic browsing applications consider transmission costs and performances of display devices, the storage size of a created PDF must be somewhat limited. For this reason, a PDF file for electronic browsing is likely to be created by simply sub-sampling a PDF file made for prepress works. This causes a novel problem of readability of bitmap-type letters in inserted pictures or drawings, which does not occur in conventional printed media. In this paper, we propose a novel compression and optimization technique of PDF files for electronic display devices, maintaining readability similar to that of print media.

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Photochromism of titanium oxide (TiO2) particles and TiO2-mica doped with metals or metal oxides has been examined. Their coloration, which was evaluated by DE under UV, was, however, low for security applications. To improve their photo properties, we studied doping conditions, especially in terms of the particle size of ferric oxide (Fe2O3) to pearl pigments. Pigments obtained by doping nanoparticles of Fe2O3 retained their pearl luster, and their coloration under UV irradiation was deeper than that of doped TiO2 or TiO2-mica. These photochromic pigments have good repeated cycling property. Silk screen printing using one of these pigments exhibited clear contrast between the UV irradiated area and the rest. Therefore, these pigments can be applied to security inks and printings with both overt and covert characteristics.

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In order to develop a high-quality and easy printing plate material, it is important to understand the printing phenomena. In this study, we could evince the mechanism of spot scumming (= machine stop greasing) generation. The more the chloride ions mix under the printing condition, the more spot scumming is generated. By morphological observations, we found that the spot scumming generated surface of a lithographic printing aluminum support is not different from the clean surface, but under an anodized aluminum film, the inner aluminum is dissolved by the chloride ion. Moreover, by electrochemical analysis, we found that the ink consumes the electron generated by aluminum solving via an oxidative polymerization mechanism. We suggest that the oxidation-reduction reaction between the ink and aluminum promotes oxidation polymerization of ink, generating spot scumming.

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