For those of you who have been following some of my writings over the years, you may recall a year-long series I did on the production inkjet landscape in the run-up to drupa 2012. In those 21 articles, I covered most, if not all, of the production inkjet vendors and their offerings at the time. I also addressed the machine components and drivers that not only delineated where the device features and strengths were, but what you should look for in the future.

Since that last article of the series in November of 2012, production inkjet technology has continued developing. While machine speeds have remained fairly static with minor improvements here and there, as we expected, image quality has made some good progress. This progress can be primarily attributed to continued development in inkjet heads and the enhanced manufacturing of inkjet inks using nano pigment grinds. With the increase in resolution and even more importantly, the increase in pigment loading and dispersion on the sheet, we are seeing a much wider use of inkjet in higher quality applications like Direct Mail, Commercial Print, Labels and Packaging.

Up to now, many production inkjet manufacturers have been ‘tweaking’ their existing products; however, we are now starting to see newly redesigned offerings. The latest example of this is the recently announced Océ ImageStream 3500 from Canon (aka Océ JetStream 3500 GA in Japan).