Objectives and content

Ink Jet (IJ) printing is a very cost effective form of imaging from Personal Computers and Workstations in Home and Office environments, and is used for printing on paper and film from document through to poster size. It does, however, still suffer from various limitations which restrict its use in some applications, and impose operational complications in others. In particular, high quality colour printing requires the use of expensive coated paper, the dry time is rather long (especially when printing on film) restricting printing speeds and causing handling problems, the water resistance and lightfastness tends to be mediocre and printhead nozzles are prone to blockage.

Although IJ printer consumable manufacturers (ink suppliers, paper and film makers, and IJ printhead manufacturers) have been researching these problems for several years, the research has tended to be in isolation. In this project proposal, a consortium of IJ consumable manufacturers are addressing the problems through collaborative research into the interactions between the various elements of the IJ printing system, leading to a complete prototype IJ consumables system in which all the components have been developed to give the optimum IJ printing performance when used in combination. Objectives include the achievement of bright, high quality colour printing on plain paper with a high content of recycled pulp, handleable prints within 5 sec., high reliability and improved print durability. Basic modular software for automatic image correction will also be developed

The IJ imaging system will be investigated by techniques including high resolution image analysis to examine the quality of the image, surface analysis to study the mechanism of the interactions between ink and substrate, and IJ drop velocity measurements.

The consortium comprises an IJ ink and colourant manufacturer (Zeneca), a high quality office paper maker (Arjo Wiggins), an IJ printing film maker (Celfa), an IJ printhead and printer manufacturer (Olivetti-Canon), a paper chemicals manufacturer (Eka Nobel) and the Laboratory of Graphic Arts Technology at the Helsinki University of Technology.