Each dish will feature a new nugget to chew on and fuel your digital cravings. Throughout 2019, Sylvamo's Digital Print Expert, Rick Williams, fed you various tips, tricks, and considerations when printing digitally, and as promised, the Digital Dish continues in 2020 with new hosts, the first of this year being our friends at Kodak. Keep reading to learn more about this OEM, including tips for print providers new to production inkjet to better understand media compatibility and select the optimal substrate for your print applications.
NEW TO INKJET?
If you're a print provider new to production inkjet, selecting the right substrate is going to be key to successfully harnessing the power and promise of today’s high-speed inkjet printing systems. While many papers may look alike, printers know that different properties - pulp, additives, smoothness, and surface chemistry, for example — are specially formulated to support different applications, such as books, direct mail, catalogs and magazines. Inkjet papers have unique advantages for image quality. They are optimized for optical density and color gamut, and formulated to reduce color-to-color bleed, show-through and ink mottle. The opportunity for every market, therefore, is to match the quality, production and price goals with substrates that deliver predictability and performance.
INKJET PRINT APPLICATIONS
Ultimately, the selection of an ideal substrate is driven by the characteristics and demands of printed output. Run lengths, color or monochrome, and variable data all impact the decision — and may often call for a hybrid approach. In book printing, paper choices are driven by publishers, where initial production involves long print runs on an offset press in black and white. This may be supplemented later with short runs using inkjet presses. For direct mail and color-critical applications, marketers and agencies make a paper choice based on their desired result and impact. These print runs typically emphasize faster turnaround times, variable data, adjustable run lengths, full color and high quality, all of which can be achieved with production inkjet.
CHOSE YOUR SUBSTRATE
Advances in high-speed color inkjet systems have extended the realm of digital printing from monochrome transactional applications to color-critical books, catalogs and magazines.Today, a broad range of commercially available inkjet-compatible substrates can be run on Kodak PROSPER presses at full press speeds up to 1,000 fpm/300 mpm, including industry-standard uncoated, coated, and even glossy papers from 42 – 270 gsm. For packaging applications, the PROSPER 6000S simplex press extends the substrate weight range up to 405 gsm. These substrates are printed on PROSPER presses with Kodak’s water-based pigment inks.
SYLVAMO'S ONLINE DIGITAL PORTFOLIO
Thank you to Kodak for contributing to this month's Digital Dish. Stay tuned for more information from Kodak throughout the year. For a complete list of Sylvamo's digital inkjet product line, visit our website.
