The fine art of printing

The technology of creating thousands of copies from a single manuscript may have been the baby of the Chinese in early 600 AD, but the innovations and inventions today are happening far away from its womb

Thursday, November 02, 2006

What are rotogravure and flexography? How about making someone into tinier and tinier pieces using an inkjet printer-and wonder what made that so special? Did you know that a certain print equipment vendor has completely done away with the requirement of having a drum inside a laser printer and turns out better prints than before? The world of printing is littered with jargon and buzzwords. We take you through some of them that try to deliver better, faster, quieter prints, while saving on raw material and making printing easier.

Rotogravure is the technology where you have a separate printing unit per color usually in the CMYK color set. Flexography is also called 'surface printing' especially on flexible material like cloth and bags.

Evolution
Although the core reason for using a printer today still remains the ability to transfer a document to printed 'hard copy' format, that is not the only reason for innovation today. The printing machines of yesteryears have evolved out of their 'print only' avatars to be 'print capable' machines today. Whether they are termed 'multi functional' or 'all in one' devices, the printers we see around us are more than electronics with the simple task of transferring ink to paper in a variety of patterns and colors. They are now at the core of the connectedness revolution, or the age of collaboration.

The first printing devices had limited memories built in, which could hold no more than a few bytes of information about the job they were executing. Then, more memory was added as well as the ability granted to let them be shared among multiple users through a PC, spool bigger documents and even multiple documents and print them. The printer was directly connected to the local network and used by anyone that had access to that network. Tasks that used the same electronics and were closely related enough to add value to the product were added --- photocopying, scanning and faxing. And the MFD of today was born. But innovators were not satisfied as yet.

They said 'hey, why have people sent the same documents again and again to print?' So they decided to add a permanent storage to the MFD, in the form of a hard disk. To manage those documents, a DMS (document management system) was added. Well, if you had a DMS and needed to share the documents with different users, a minimalist workflow system would be handy too. And when someone placed a document on the scan-bed of such an MFD, wouldn't it be really cool to have the scanned document go directly into a preconfigured folder on that user's workstation? You're now staring directly at a printer from the modern age.

The colloidal toner used in laser printers is usually powdered from a block of it. This gives no control over print quality. To solve this, toner particles are now chemically grown under controlled environments-this gives better print quality

Many MFDs, in the mid to high end range for offices now come with mailbox facilities. With this technology, when a document is scanned, the scan-output can go into one of several user's folders either on the MFD, a centralized document store or the particular user's workstation where installed software pick it up and drop it into a preconfigured folder. These folders and hence its content can be organized according to what kinds of document they are: for example a scanned contract document can go into a folder called 'contracts'. When someone else requires the same document, the item can simply be moved or copied from these folders instead of having to scan it all over again.

Regardless of whether the document being printed is text or graphics, the data is first rendered as a graphic inside the printer's memory and then printed. Now, each time the printer is required to print the same page, this operation has to be repeated. Instead of this, a device that can store pre-rendered images into persistent storage like a hard disk will save a lot of time.

Since such MFDs are already connected to the local network, it can also access the same resources as the workstations on the network. This means, if there is access to e-mail, then the MFD can potentially email as well. This technology is also harnessed in quite a few MFDs around the office today. With this, if for example you need to scan a document and need to send it off to someone via email, you need not scan it, pull it to a computer and then email it. The MFD can be setup with the SMTP server settings and the device itself can send off the email. Similarly, the MFD can be setup to watch POP3 or IMAP folders for certain kinds of mail, download their attachments and either print it out or send it to someone's DMS folder. Side by side, printers moved from something relegated to the back office or a separate print-shop room in the office to being in every household, being on the desktop and the next gossip hub after the water cooler. This bade the ubiquitous print capable device go color. We're not talking print cartridge, but the exterior style. Stylish printers now grace executive desktops and our home work-desks. They have grown used to being eye-candy.

You work on a multi floor or multi building office. Printing out the document locally and having to fetch it to someone on a different floor or building is a hassle. Instead of that, wouldn't it be nicer to fire the print at your workstation, but the print comes out of any printer that you please anywhere in your network? Well, this is also possible with today's technology.

Preventing the misuse of resources in an organization of whatever the size is not easy. But with technologies of authentication and authorization, it is possible to make sure that only those users who are authorized to print on a particular device can print from it. Using the same technologies, it is also possible to allow certain people to print only certain kinds of documents --- for example, if someone prints out an email, then color could be disallowed and the document would be printed out using only black. Similarly, administrators could also setup particular applications to do color while everything else does only black.

Also, prints can be protected from unauthorized access using security codes, PIN numbers or technologies such as RFID. Let's say you are trying to print your salary statement and don't want anyone else to have a peek at it before you reach the printer. With such protection mechanisms in place, you could fire a print with the option checked that you don't want the print to come out immediately. Now, you can walk over to the printer or MFD at your leisure. Only once you tap in your PIN code or swipe your RFID (could be your employee access card as well) at the printer would your print out appear. For these technologies to work, your printer/MFD is linked to the same network domain you log on to (eg: an LDAP or Active Directory domain). The device will pick up your credentials as set up.

What vendors are upto
Let's take a look at different printing technologies .

Anti-refilling Ink Tanks
This is a generic term to describe technology used by different vendors to combat pirate refilling of ink cartridges. The common denominator between the variations is that there is some kind of electronics inside the ink cartridge that either self destructs the unit or tells the printer that this unit has been used before with a lesser amount of ink.

The end result is that such cartridges cannot be reused. Pirate refillers have still found a way around, by replacing or reprogramming these chips to reset their state and fool the printers into accepting them as fresh stock.

Mailboxes in MFDs
Multi-functionals now come with the ability to send and receive email. But where would they store it? Also, it would be a hassle to reprint or rescan documents again and again. Therefore, MFDs now bundle hard disks inside them that can store your documents for you. You can create folders and organize them. Access control lists can protect who has what kind of access to the files stored in a mailbox. When someone else wants the document, it can be copied or moved to that mailbox in a simple operation. Embedded software can check your mail, and organize attachments into your folders, ready for print.

Gloss Mark (Xerox)
This is an accidental invention that uses defects in a printout like banding to insert digital information on to printouts that cannot be duplicated using scanning or photocopying. This is used as a sort of watermark to protect the document. Such information is not normally visible but can be seen when the documents is held at a certain angle or under certain lighting.

Picolitre/FINE (Canon)
Full Photolithography Inkjet Nozzle Engineering is the correct technical lane for the buzzword from Canon---Picolitre. In inkjets, the print head has several nozzles that spray a fine stream of ink droplets with a size of about 5 Picolitres on to the paper. FINE creates droplets of 1 Picolitre size that makes the output clearer and sharper. Mid to high end models of inkjet printers with Picolitre can produce an output with a resolution of 9600 dpi. Entry-level models can do 4800 dpi.

Full Concurrency
A multifunctional device will pause a new print job while there is a scan in progress. Although a scan does not make use of components required for printing like the cartridge this delay still happens and is avoidable. Full concurrency is the term coined to describe an MFD that can process a scan and a print job simultaneously.

Fixing Film (Canon)
It takes some time to heat up a metallic roller compared to a sheet of the same metal. The heat roller inside the laser printer traditionally uses a roller made of aluminium to melt the toner. A fixing film---made of a very fine aluminium sheet---is used to save energy, heat up faster as well as cool down quickly with the same results.

Spherical Toner
Pulverizing a block of the mixture can make laser toners but this creates particles of uneven size creating inconsistency and defects in the printout. To avoid this the toner particles can be chemically grown under controlled conditions to create particles of a desired size and shape. The answer found is the spherical particle and the toner with such particles is called a Spherical Toner (S Toner). Cleaner-less Toner is a variation of this where wax is added to lubricate the roller.

DID
When multiple printers of the same model or family from the same vendor are deployed on a single network it is redundant to have to setup each one separately. To help with this, DID is an innovation that lets one configured printer publish and deliver its configuration on demand to another printer of the same model or family on the network. No manual intervention is necessary to transfer this information apart from indicating to one of the printers that such mechanism is either desired or available for use.

Follow Me Printing
For this you require atleast two printers of the same family with AnyPlace Printing enable. Users of these printers would be assigned PIN codes which are known to the printers. The software installed on the user desktops would offer the option of Follow Me Printing. When checked, the user can simply fire a print without selecting a particular printer and walk away.

He can then go to any of the AnyPlace Printing devices, enter his PIN and the printout would appear from that device, regardless of the floor, building or city as long as it is on the same network or access has been provided.

Remote Copy
Similar to AnyPlace printing this sends a scanned image to another device, but may not require entry of a PIN. The user here would place a document for scan at his local device, select remote copy and specify the target device. The copy printout would appear from the remote device that can be a several thousand kilometers away.

Transmit/RIP once (HP)
The software inside the printer will first render anything sent to it as a picture in the memory and then prints this image. This operation must repeat every time the page is sent, causing delays. The rendered image (called a Rasterized Image) is cached on a hard disk in the printer, letting you transmit and rasterize it only once speeding up output.

Instant On (HP)
Printers are configured to go to sleep when there is an idle period to save electricity. When you fire a print it must wake up, get up to temperature before it can print. Instant On keeps the printer at a certain temperature so that it can start printing as soon as it can wake up.

Edgeline (HP)
An inkjet's print head is much smaller than the surface of the paper it must print on. This means the head must travel from one edge to the other before it can print a complete line of a document. Edgeline printers from HP use a print heads that cover the entire width of the paper. The print head stay stationary while it is the paper that moves along.

ImageREt (HP)
Image Resolution Enhancement Technology is a modification to the laser toner to produce hi-res images. Multiple dots of color are overlaid to produce a single dot of better quality. The size of the dot and positioning on the media is controlled electronically. The technology is optimized for use on HP's LaserJet paper.

Color Access Control
Using traditional authorization software, it is possible to assign ACLs on a per-user, per software basis. Each user can be limited or allowed to use single color or full color for printouts as per their role. For instance the front-desk operator is permitted to take out only black prints and the Marketing Manager can take black or color printout.

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