Digital Colour Printing on the Way to Offset Quality
|
| Title | Digital Colour Printing on the Way to Offset Quality |
| Authors | |
| Abstract | Digital production colour printing is now more than ten years old. The first implementations of this technology from Indigo and Xeikon started the market but they suffered problems with reliability,quality and overall running costs. They produced a very good-looking printed image but it was notcomparable to offset. Quality problems were that tints often were streaky or banded, flat tints did notreproduce well, and the overall image had a somewhat harsh reflective look.Ongoing developments of digital colour printing mainly from Xerox and Canon developed the marketand improved the economics of the process. Certain elements of the quality also improved. Indigoand Xeikon also showed significant quality improvements and better economics. The improvedquality came closer to the look of offset, but in most cases was still obviously printed digitally.New developments are happening in what is termed "Digital Colour Lite." This is a range of new slower presses coming from Japan which run at around 30 pages/minute and cost well under 50.000 Euro. A few of these are getting almost offset quality through the use of new chemical toners that significantly improve printing quality.At the same time as the quality of digital colour printing has improved, so have the cost economics of running the presses. Potential buyers of presses will have to understand the different business models for running these presses. These are the "click" models from most suppliers, or the pay by usage model as offered by Heidelberg with the NexPress. |
| Publisher | Acta Graphica |
| Date | 2004-12-12 |
| Source | Acta Graphica Vol 16, No 1-4 (2004) |
| Rights | The Author assign(s) to ACTA GRAPHICA d.o.o. copyright ownership in the Paper, effective if and when the Paper is accepted for publication by journal ACTA GRAPHICA and to the extent transferable under applicable national law. This assignment gives ACTA GRAPHICA d.o.o. the right to register copyright to the Paper in its name as claimant and to publish the Paper in any print or electronic medium.Authors, or their employers in the case of works made for hire, retain the following rights:All proprietary rights other than copyright, including patent rights.The right to make and distribute copies of the Paper for internal purposes.The right to use the material for lecture or classroom purposes.The right to prepare derivative publications based on the Paper, including books or book chapters, journal papers,and magazine articles, provided that publication of a derivative work occurs subsequent to the official date of publication by ACTA GRAPHICA.The right to post an author-prepared version or an official version (preferred version) of the published paper on an internal or external server controlled exclusively by the author/employer, provided that (a) such posting is noncommercial in nature and the paper is made available to users without charge; (b) a copyright notice and full citation appear with the paper, and (c) a link to ACTA GRAPHICA’s official online version of the abstract is provided using the link provided by Acta Graphica. |