Make Way for Ink-jet

Today, there are two “inhibitors” to wider adoption of ink-jet for page production, Corr asserted.

1. It’s difficult to get all three of the prerequisite characteristics—low cost, high speed and high quality—in the same box.

2. There is a lag in “time to market” compared to EP systems.

The ink-jet imaging process is simple and direct compared to xerography (also known as EP), but it has its own challenges, added fellow panelist Peter Crean, senior fellow at Xerox. The issues include drying (on the substrate and not in the nozzle), a tendency to produce “pattern errors” in output, no tolerance for failure in any of the thousands of systems in a print head, and interactions between ink and paper that are complex and unpredictable.