Ink Consumption Research Articles

From Application to Resolution

In the ink-jet industry, we see more and more the trend adopted by printer vendors to implement higher resolutions in their printers, suggesting that this is what gives the prints a better quality. The authors address this issue in a methodological manner, suggesting a practical approach to defining the necessary printer resolution for a given application.Focusing on industrial applications, the article describes the decision process of choosing the right print resolution for the right application on the printing machine, using both theoretical and practical considerations. The proposed step by step process, guides the product architect to taking into consideration various factors and putting them all together as design guides for the ideal printer for any application. Human factors, such as eye visibility, alongside printer factors, such as dot placement accuracy, cost, throughput, data overload and ink consumption are all integrated into the methodological approach.In order to get the best cost performance ratio for an industrial printer, ink-jet print heads may be better optimized for a completely different working point than what current head vendors are actually offering. The challenge of meeting industrial high throughput demands at relatively low cost and with proper image quality has been shown to dictate a working point that calls for a dedicated head design matched for industrial printing applications. Such a print-head is under development and shown to meet the set of requirements dictated by the system design process.

In Dependent Color Halftoning, Yellow Matters

The most straightforward way of halftoning a color image is to halftone its cyan, magenta, and yellow channels independently. It has been shown in literature that halftoning the color channels dependently and using dot-off-dot strategy as much as possible will improve the print quality. Since a yellow dot on white substrate is much less visible than the other two colored dots in a number of methods only the C and M channels are halftoned dependently and the Y channel is halftoned independent of the two others. In this paper we will show that preventing the yellow dots from being printed on blue dots will improve the print quality and results in smoother textures. The color reproduction and the ink consumption for the proposed dependent color halftoning are also discussed.

Optimizing the Parameters of a Maintenance Station

Tally has developed a new high-power inkjet printer. Two significant aims of the development were low costs per page and high-speed printout. During this project a maintenance station was designed and optimized with regard to the a. m. points. The maintenance station works with underpressure and is able to clean the nozzle plate of the piezo-printheads with a wiper, which removes the oil based ink and paper dust. A separate cover protects the maintenance station from paper debris during printing.In order to save time and ink we examined the influence of various parameters as the amount of underpressure and the effect of sudden pressure changes on the maintenance efficiency and functional stability of the printheads. The analysis revealed reliable and less reliable areas.Furthermore, we tried to find out how the ink consumption could be minimized during the cleaning process. In all measurements the nozzle failure was not provoked, but occurred when printing a normal print job. As a result of our investigations we could define a working area for the printer maintenance with a high nozzle recovery efficiency an a low ink consumption.