The Paper Conundrum for High-Speed Inkjet

I’ve heard some interesting complaints recently about high-speed inkjet from people who work for large paper mills. They said (and this is condensed a bit from multiple conversations): “For years we have been making offset papers that were designed not to absorb water from an offset fountain solution, and now, with the rapid growth of inkjet, we are in the position of trying to design papers that won’t absorb fountain solution but will absorb water-based inkjet inks.” (Picture a bunch of paper mill executives throwing their hands up in exasperation.)

And there’s more: “Adapting papers for offset and toner-based digital was relatively easy for us,” they moaned. “At least then you were pressing something (i.e., the ink or toner) into the paper. Now you want a paper that works well with water-based inks that get sprayed on? Maybe if you’d talked to us when you were developing these products we could have been more helpful but now we’re doing it on the fly.” Oy vey. I feel their pain.

If you look at some of the new and upcoming inkjet printing systems for commercial print it’s not even clear that the system vendors and the paper mills are on the same page. I feel comfortable saying that the paper mills are pretty convinced that the way to solve the inkjet issue is with pre-treated papers, but there is another group, among many of the inkjet printing system vendors, who are trying to solve the problem with sophisticated inks and drying systems. There’s a nirvana, if you will, or maybe a Holy Grail, where the ink and drying systems solve all the problems so that high-speed inkjet printing systems can print at high coverage on just about any coated paper. It’s possible that both sides have a valid point, but in the end the most successful inkjet printing systems will be the ones that are economically viable.

Here’s my beef with putting all the emphasis on the ink. It costs a lot. You may have heard that the inkjet ink for your home printer is one of the most expensive liquids on earth, though that is not quite true. Apparently, scorpion venom is more expensive per ounce. But it is true that so much of the technology in an inkjet system is built into the inks that they are a very significant cost component.

One of the things that differentiates offset printing from production inkjet is the cost of ink. Offset inks are relatively inexpensive. Not so with inkjet. Today, print service providers at the front lines are learning the hard way that using an inexpensive paper on an inkjet project can be financially disastrous in the long run because of the amount of ink you need to lay down to get a good-looking result. Not only that, but the energy consumption costs of the drying units on some of the high-end inkjet systems can add significantly to the cost of a project. If variable data isn’t part of the job, it then becomes counterproductive to use a digital technology. We all know that offset printing is extremely cost-effective at making a lot of copies of the same thing. This inkjet coverage / paper cost equation is real and is at the center of the argument about whether pre-treatment makes the most sense versus sophisticated inks and drying systems.

Here’s another nugget learned from conversations with the major inkjet printing system vendors. They all offer paper profiles that are designed to achieve the best result with a given paper, but there’s more. There are often slight variations of these profiles related to output quality and ink consumption. Say that you are cost conscious, well, there’s a paper profile setting for you. It’s probably got a name like “Good” which means that if you’re not too picky about print quality, this setting will work fine and not cost you a boatload in consumables. Want higher quality levels? Well, let’s play around with print resolution, drop size, and UCR/GCR to see what we can do without breaking the bank. These higher quality profiles are generally called something like “Better” and “Best.” And it all comes down to this question: How much ink do you want to use? If your system has sophisticated inks and dryers, you need to be paying attention to this.

Another point that is extremely relevant in the commercial printing market is speed. Inkjet systems are getting faster and faster so that their productivity begins to rival web offset presses for certain run lengths. And yet the issue of ink coverage can impact speed as well. Maybe you have to run the system at a slower speed because you need the high-resolution setting to take advantage of smaller drop size so that you have better control over the volume of ink consumed. Maybe you have to slow the system down because the dryers need more time to dry the ink at high coverage. Neither of these options is particularly appealing to someone who has paid a million dollars or more for a high-speed system.

The success of high productivity inkjet systems will depend on economically viable solutions, particularly in the commercial print market where printing on coated papers is a given. If you ask the paper mills, that solution needs to include inkjet-treated papers. Many of the system vendors are hedging their bets, developing systems with sophisticated inks and dryers in the hope that these will pave the way forward, while also having products in their portfolios that do not have as much expense built into the inks and dryers.

In the end it is the commercial printers who will be on the forefront of determining which, or which combination, will be the economic winner. And while this has already been playing out in the market, I think that 2020 is the year when it really comes to the forefront.