Digital Printing Development Inventory

For a long time, digital printing seems to carry many people's dreams about the development of the printing technology in the future. It has not been easy to stumble along the way. However, the pace of digital printing has never stopped. Since 1993, Indigo launched the world's first truly digital printer at the IPEX show, digital printing technology has made great progress in hardware, software and materials. As the drab exhibition for the development of printing technology, inkjet printing is the theme this year, and the wave of digital printing development is evident. The author will try to present the latest development of digital printing technology by introducing the development of digital printing technology in all aspects in the past year.

Equipment articles

At drupa2008, 64 exhibitors exhibited digital presses. The huge number of digital printing equipment vendors is visible. With the fierce market competition among various manufacturers, digital printing equipment can develop rapidly. Taking a look at the flagship products of major manufacturers, digital printing equipment has shown that the printing speed has been continuously improved and the printing quality has even exceeded or even surpassed the characteristics of offset printing.

Whenever, speed is always one of the focuses of people's attention. Compared with traditional offset printing, digital printing equipment will print much closer to offset than the offset, and its speed will be much lower than that of offset printing. For digital printing equipment manufacturers, it is the only way for digital printing to challenge offset printing and improve the speed of high-precision color printing in digital printing systems. Digital printing, on the premise of guaranteeing the printing quality, increases the printing speed. At present, there are two significant development directions, namely the improvement of the printing engine and the increase of the printing format.

1. Engine Improvements Kodak's Stream Concept Machine gives us unlimited imagination about high-speed digital printing systems. This concept machine can print the print quality of the current Kodak digital color press in a 44cm wide rotary system, but the speed is significantly increased, up to 2500 pages per minute, and the applicable media range is more extensive. An image quality analysis report completed by SpencerLAB, an independent digital imaging test company, states that the Kodak Stream concept printer can achieve an offset quality equivalent to 175 lines per inch, and the Stream concept proof has a color gamut that is larger than the 175 line/inch proof proof. The % and black density is 29% higher than the offset proofs. This Kodak devoted four-year continuous inkjet printer has greatly replaced the momentum of offset printing, the traditional offset printing equipment manufacturers may have smelled the breath of competition.

In order to increase the printing speed, digital printing equipment manufacturers have improved their printing engines and upgraded their original products. Taking HP as an example, the company will introduce a new Indigo 7000 press with a maximum speed of 240 pages per minute. Its 812 point/inch, 8-bit/pixel recording head can process 775 M pixels per second. Xerox's new iGen4 is also known as the "highest-production single-sheet digital press with the highest printing quality in the printing industry." Compared to its predecessor, iGen3, its production capacity has increased by 25% to 35%, and Can produce offset and photo quality images and continuous colors, running at up to 110 pages/minute.

In addition, Xerox Concept Color 220, Xerox’s concept machine, achieves twice the output speed of the iGen3 digital press by integrating two digital presses together. The main high-speed web digital presses on the market today are the HP Indigo 7000, HP Indigo W7200, NexPress s3600, Oce JetStream2200, Xeikon 8000, InfoPrint5000, and Versamark VL2000. The speed and accuracy data of some of the above devices are shown in Table 1.

2. Wide-format digital printers mention wide-format digital printers and have to mention Inkjet Web Press. The 762mm web press is designed for newspapers, books, and direct mail markets, with a maximum print speed of 2,600 pages per minute. According to HP’s official announcement, the color printing cost of printing 30% full-page A4 paper on this machine is only US$0.01, and the cost for black and white printing is only US$0.0015. If this machine can be launched next year as scheduled, it will become the fastest and lowest cost digital press.

Although the application of inkjet technology has been quite mature in the field of large-format and super-large-format inkjet, in the field of wide-format digital printing, the progress of inkjet printing technology has shown a strong momentum of development in recent years. Thanks to advances in nozzle technology, more and more manufacturers are able to fabricate an array of nozzles with the same width as the press, so that one inkjet can cover the entire web without having to pass the paper several times through the nozzle. Greatly improved the speed of inkjet printing. At present, representative products of wide-format digital printers include Jet Press 720 from Fujifilm, QPress from Jadason, and Truepress Jet SX from Screen.

The Truepress Jet SX is the world's first inkjet printer with cutting capabilities. The target market is the B2 format market, which can use inkjet technology to achieve an offset press production speed of 1,600 sheets per hour. Jet Press 720 was developed by Fujifilm's Dimatix and uses a full-width (720mm) printhead. This printhead consists of a high-density, long-life array of MEMS piezo printing elements. There are four different sizes for the ink jet process. The ink droplets, so a paper feeding process can achieve 4 different print densities. Qpress is a surprise for us from Jadason, a Hong Kong-based equipment company. It is the world's first B2 format toner production digital press. Its maximum speed and resolution are 100A4 pages per minute and 1200dpi respectively. The main parameters of these 3 digital printing equipments are shown in Table 2.

From the basic parameters of the above three products, we can see that the width of the current wide-format sheet-fed digital press is mainly large-scale, and has a high printing speed and accuracy. The wide range also facilitates compatibility with traditional postpress equipment, preserves the original equipment investment results, and reduces investment costs.

Software articles

A few years ago, some experts pointed out that with the advancement of high-speed inkjet systems, speed and print quality are no longer the bottleneck that restricts the development of digital printing, but they support typesetting software, digital workflow software, and digital content creation software for high-speed digital printing systems. Whether it can meet the needs of the rapidly developing digital printing market will become a difficult point for future development.

1. Digital Printing Workflow With the coexistence of printing services such as general printing and variable data printing, black and white printing and color printing, single-page printing and on-demand publishing, the complexity of the workflow has increased geometrically. If there is no guarantee that the printing process will proceed smoothly, the advantages of digital printing will be greatly reduced. However, major digital printing equipment manufacturers have spared no effort to develop advanced hardware devices, and did not ignore the development of supporting process software. Such as HP's introduction of HP SmartStream digital printing process management system, Fuji Xerox's FreeFlow, Océ's PRISMA and so on.

The "Roll Over Gutenberg" book production process just displayed in drupa2008 has demonstrated that digital workflow is equally important for digital printing. Under the management of the Océ PRISMAprepare process, the Oce VarioPrint 6250 (Black and White) and Oce CS650 Pro (Color) 2 digital presses work closely with the front-end and back-end processes to complete the entire production process of Roll Over Gutenberg. The entire workflow is managed by Océ PRISMAprepare, which separates the black and white parts of the document and ensures that each page of data is correctly sent to 2 sets of black and white or color digital printing equipment.

PRISMA focuses on the workflow of digital printing, and FreeFlow goes one step further, focusing on the integration of digital printing and traditional printing digital workflows. The latest version of FreeFlow enables the sharing and interaction of job information with Prinergy and Fuji XMF. It can send printed jobs from the digital printing system to the CTP device or from the offset printing system to the digital printing system. The success of FreeFlow may lead us to believe that the digital printing workflow is beginning to take over the future of mixed-printing processes.

2. Network Printing Platform Although online printing can bring more convenient communication channels, lower costs, and faster service, how to smoothly convert customer's online orders into final products is a must for manufacturers who are engaged in online printing services. The problem to be faced. Although services for accepting orders on the Internet abound, products that really integrate network printing platforms into digital printing digital workflows are rare. Fortunately, the development of the network printing integration platform has been able to link the ordering, creation, on-demand printing, binding, logistics and distribution processes of the network together to meet the fast, personalized and convenient service requirements for network printing.

In terms of products, Kodak's integrated solution for network printing is a good example. The Insite software in its product suite can realize the e-commerce functions of online stores, and then it can realize personalized page paging and template software and PRINERGY process with EyeMedia. The system can realize digital printing automatic management process. Similar representatives include Agfa's Web-based Delano management platform and Printable Technologies' Web-to-Print solution.

3. Variable data typesetting software Although most digital printing equipment will provide a certain random variable data printing function, if the variable data typesetting is completed at the time of printing, the management of the digital printing process is very unfavorable, and it cannot " The WYSIWYG "shortcomings also increase the potential for error. Therefore, it is very necessary to introduce variable data typesetting in the content production stage, which has led to the emergence of variable data typesetting software.

As more and more banks outsource bill printing to digital printing service providers, variable data printing has become a new strong growth point in the digital printing market, which has also contributed to the rapid development of variable data typesetting software. In the field of commercial direct mail, the data that can be processed by the variable data typesetting software is relatively fixed and relatively simple to implement. For example, the entry-level variable data typesetting software PrintShop Mail can easily complete personalized business cards, mail, and direct mail. The typesetting and printing of advertisements and other products. Similar software includes XMPie's PersonalEffect, PODS's DARWIN VI Authoring Tool, and Firefox's Fire and Variable Data Publishing Software.

Compared with the typesetting requirements of commercial direct mail products, the difficulty of typesetting the bills is much greater, mainly reflected in the increase in variable data volume and variable data fields. This also puts forward new requirements for variable data typesetting software. However, many companies have already launched corresponding products on the market, such as the Printnet Designer variable data typesetting software recently released by GMC and the newly launched by Founder Electronics. Wen Rui Business Letter Edition can be used to meet the complex layout requirements of products such as credit card bills.

Materials

The improvement of printing quality, speed, and substrates for digital printing equipment is inseparable from the development of digital printing materials, especially digital inks and toners. With the increasingly fierce competition in the digital printing market, digital printing equipment suppliers have increased investment in R&D for new inks and toners. In addition to the consistent advantages of water-based inks and enhanced durability, the development of various electronic inks such as solvent-based inks, eco-ink, sublimation inks, and UV inks has allowed the development of alternative inks to diversify. . The innovative application of toner on inkjet printing has also given us more imagination about the future of inkjet printing.

1. Water-based inks With the increasing awareness of environmental protection, the use of water-based inks has become more widespread. The color gamut that water-based inks can replicate is almost the largest in all ink systems, so water-based inks have a natural advantage in color performance. However, since water-based inks are generally based on dyes and pigment formulations, their service life is between a few days and one month, and they need to be used in conjunction with specialized coated inkjet substrates, which restricts the promotion of water-based inks. However, the introduction of the latest HP Latex water-based ink may solve this problem. Latex water-based inks are said to provide long-lasting, high-quality printing results for a variety of HP-produced or non-HP-produced media. Even uncoated products can exhibit outdoor durability of up to 3 years. . However, the true market value and application value of this kind of ink still need the test of time.

2. Toner Usually toner is used in digital presses that use electrostatic sensitized imaging, while Océ's CrystalPoint process toners have revolutionized the way toner is used, as shown in Figure 1. The process uses a microsphere toner, which Océ Corporation calls Toner Pearls. The toner can be converted into a gel and then printed on paper with an ink-jet method. The printing effect is: Half light, the image will not change with water. Since the toner does not dissolve during printing, the CrystalPoint process can obtain high-precision detail reproduction, and no feathering due to ink spreading occurs at the sharp edges. The latest ColorWave 600 digital press is the latest result of this new process.

3. UV-curable inks Gel-curable inks specifically developed for digital printers, which are currently being developed by Xerox, can be used for the printing of thin-film, smooth-surfaced plastics, and cardboard, with a wide range of media. The stickiness of this gel-cured ink is similar to that of peanut butter, and when heated it becomes a viscous liquid like a motor oil. In the heated state, the liquid ink is ejected from the print head by ink jet, transferred to the surface of the substrate such as a metal foil, plastics, etc., and after cooling, the peanut butter-like consistency is restored, and the ink is cured by the UV light curing device. dry. However, the ink was only exposed on drupa2008 for a short time. The specific date of listing has not yet been determined.

Although digital printing bears people's ideal for digital printing in the future, development has undergone rough times. However, with the development of digital printing equipment, software, materials, and other aspects of technology, the cost of digital printing will become lower and lower, and the scope of application will also become increasingly widespread. We have reason to expect a brighter future for digital printing!