Sean Milmo, European Editor01.27.16
Printed information, the vast majority of it provided by ink on paper, is becoming complementary to the mass of data available online.
Online devotees in Europe are gradually moving over or back to print, as at least a secondary source of information, with the major attraction being the feel, convenience and visual impact of paper. Research has shown that information on paper is trusted more than online.
The appeal of print is even more powerful when ink works well with paper so that it is able to display more effectively the strength of its colors, its color gamut and sharpness of its lines.
Paper makers, ink producers and press equipment manufacturers are now combining more frequently to develop inks and papers which together can achieve new advances in print quality. The biggest changes have been in the make-up and properties of papers to provide more efficient substrates for inks. To a great extent these have been made possible by the development of imaging and analytical technologies which have enabled paper scientists to investigate the structure of papers at the nanoscale level.
3D Nature of Paper
Paper used to be regarded as being two dimensional but now, as result of microscopy and X-ray research, has shown itself to be a three-dimensional structure based on a network of layers of fibers and small fragments of cellulosic material. Still, aspects of the mechanics, physics, chemistry and optics remain a mystery.
Knowledge about the interaction between paper and ink could be increased considerably by recent research at Finland’s Jyvaskyla University, where scientists have created a nanoscale map of toner ink on paper by using X-ray, optical profilometry and laser ablation techniques.
First they investigated the surface structure of the paper with X-ray microtomography, similar to the computed tomographic scanning technology applied in medicine to provide images of the inside of the body. Then they obtained a surface profile of the ink by bouncing light beams off it. Finally they were able to find out the ink thickness by using laser ablation to remove amounts of it to determine its depth, according to a paper by the research team published in the Journal of Applied Physics.
The researchers were the first to use all three of the imaging techniques to display the complex microstructures of ink on paper, which are similar to a mountainous landscape. The toner on the peaks was much thinner than that in the valleys, showing that its relative thickness was determined by the paper’s physical properties rather than its chemistry.
“We believe that this (research) gives new insight, especially on how the topography of paper impacts the ink setting or consolidation,” explained Markko Myllys, an applied physicist at Jyvaskyla University. “This in turn helps us understand how glossy and non-glossy printed surfaces should be made.”
He thought knowledge about the topographical variations in ink and paper would help the printing industry to optimize size distribution of ink particles.
Declining Demand for Paper
Opportunities for greater efficiencies in the interactions between ink and paper are emerging at a time when total demand for paper is continuing to decrease in Europe. The European print industry is facing an urgent need to bolster consumption, particularly for graphics papers, with the most promising prospects being in specialist and premium papers.
In 2014 pulp and paper sales of members of the Confederation of European Paper Industries (CEPI), accounting for 93% of pulp and paper European output, went down by 1.1%. In the period 2014-2000, turnover of CEPI members fell by 6.2%. Much of the decrease stems from reductions in pulp production, resulting from a big increase in recycling of paper.
In 2014 production of paper and board dropped only by 0.2% to 91 million tons compared to the previous year. In 2014-2000 paper and board output in fact rose slightly by 0.3%. Production capacity of paper and board has gone up by 3.4% since the turn of the century.
However, increases in paper and board output and capacity have been due to a relatively sharp rise in exports, which have risen by 38% since 2000. Consumption of paper and board in Europe declined by 0.7% in 2014 and by 6.1% in 2014-2000, with much of the decrease due to reductions in demand for graphics paper, particularly newsprint.
Paper makers, as well as ink producers, are hoping that the steady decline in demand can be reversed by a continued switch among consumers back to paper. This will be driven by strong sales of higher quality paper grades, higher standards of printing with improvements in paper-ink synergies and the forging of closer ties between the internet and print.
“What a paper grade might lack in surface and tactile interaction can be boosted quite dramatically by the choice of inks, value-added print effects and the use of machine-readable codes to trigger online messaging,” said Terry Parry, head of technical sales at Finnish-based UPM, a leading European paper manufacturer.
One of the biggest potentials for advances in paper quality and the interfaces between paper and ink is in packaging, for which demand in Europe has increased by around 5% to 6% since the early 2000s.
Another area of bright prospects for paper and ink innovations is direct mail, which has been declining in volume in many European countries but rising in added value. Recent research in the UK, where direct mail accounts for around 14% of all advertising expenditure in the country, has shown that the returns on investment in direct mail has risen for every £1 ($1.50) from £1.50 to £4.50.
A lot of this extra value comes from relatively high response rates to direct mail as a result of high proportions of it being opened and high average periods of over two weeks for keeping the mail. Consumers are also expressing a big preference for personalized promotional mail, a growing proportion of which is all digitally printed
New Technologies
These trends in packaging and direct mail are occurring at a time when digital printing is starting to make deep inroads into sectors traditionally dominated by offset and flexo.
The expansion in digital printing, especially inkjet, is taking place as printers are beginning to have fewer concerns about its quality and above all extra costs, such as those for the inks and papers.
Paper and ink makers have been active in developing products that deal with some of the key concerns about performance through new paper coatings and surface treatments and more weather and light resistant inks.
One result has been a big rise in the number of different grades of paper, much of it for digital printing. Paper merchants have been complaining about there being so many grades they have problems in deciding which ones to stock.
“The market for specialist grades, mainly all paper but some composites of paper and polymers, has really taken off so there has been a massive increase in numbers of grades available,”said Tim Stockley, director of Colourbyte, a distributor of papers and Epson digital printers.
“There has been strong demand from in-house printers, especially among retail chains printing their own promotional material,” he added.
Perhaps the largest paper and ink innovation recently has been in high speed inkjet printing, which is now becoming a major competitor to offset and flexo for volume work.
Most of the leading paper makers in Europe have now introduced grades for high speed inkjet printing mainly based on application-specific coatings and surface treatments. These deal with challenges like ink density, ink drop spreading, drop inconsistences, print unevenesss, streaking, bleeding, color intensity and drying rates.
Some of the papers have been developed under contract with individual OEM manufacturers of digital printing presses. The OEMs distribute them to the users of the machines, while also developing, formulating and usually making their own inks for the papers.
In most printing sectors in Europe, the big task is in creating papers and inks for printed products that encourage people to access information on websites or other sources of electronic data, mostly through smart phones.
With direct mail, a key objective of marketers is to relate the content of the mail shot to online shopping. A key feature of successful direct mail has to be the feel and visual appeal of the paper, to which a major contribution is made by the quality of inks and their interaction with the paper.
There is increased use in Europe by consumers of augmented reality (AR) codes, prompted by responses to the attraction of direct mail or, in particular, packaging. These open up apps on smart phones and tablets, giving out video, audio or graphics messages.
AR has been extended to newspapers and magazines in Europe. The Newbury Weekly News, an English local newspaper with circulation of 15,000, won the best innovation prize in the UPM-sponsored International News Awards last year for an interactive page in the paper connecting the reader with an app. By hovering a mobile phone over the page, the photo – in this case one of a dinosaur – sprang to life in 3D on the phone screen.
“It’s an incredible technology that allows you to bring a car off the page and actually drive it across the desk, just as if it was a remote-controlled car,” explained James Gurney, Newbury Weekly’s chief executive.
The Saxon regional paper Saechsische Zeitung in Germany doubled its usual circulation with the publication of an issue containing 3D photos of Saxony. The edition, which was distributed with special 3D glasses, required a special UPM paper grade and different inks. The issue was judged a big success by the publishers because it caught the attention of children and adolescents who do not normally read the paper.
As Gurney said, “Everyone in the industry is searching for that silver bullets (for finding new readers), and unless we keep trying out new ideas, we’ll never find it.”
European Editor Sean Milmo is an Essex, UK-based writer specializing in coverage of the chemical industry.
Online devotees in Europe are gradually moving over or back to print, as at least a secondary source of information, with the major attraction being the feel, convenience and visual impact of paper. Research has shown that information on paper is trusted more than online.
The appeal of print is even more powerful when ink works well with paper so that it is able to display more effectively the strength of its colors, its color gamut and sharpness of its lines.
Paper makers, ink producers and press equipment manufacturers are now combining more frequently to develop inks and papers which together can achieve new advances in print quality. The biggest changes have been in the make-up and properties of papers to provide more efficient substrates for inks. To a great extent these have been made possible by the development of imaging and analytical technologies which have enabled paper scientists to investigate the structure of papers at the nanoscale level.
3D Nature of Paper
Paper used to be regarded as being two dimensional but now, as result of microscopy and X-ray research, has shown itself to be a three-dimensional structure based on a network of layers of fibers and small fragments of cellulosic material. Still, aspects of the mechanics, physics, chemistry and optics remain a mystery.
Knowledge about the interaction between paper and ink could be increased considerably by recent research at Finland’s Jyvaskyla University, where scientists have created a nanoscale map of toner ink on paper by using X-ray, optical profilometry and laser ablation techniques.
First they investigated the surface structure of the paper with X-ray microtomography, similar to the computed tomographic scanning technology applied in medicine to provide images of the inside of the body. Then they obtained a surface profile of the ink by bouncing light beams off it. Finally they were able to find out the ink thickness by using laser ablation to remove amounts of it to determine its depth, according to a paper by the research team published in the Journal of Applied Physics.
The researchers were the first to use all three of the imaging techniques to display the complex microstructures of ink on paper, which are similar to a mountainous landscape. The toner on the peaks was much thinner than that in the valleys, showing that its relative thickness was determined by the paper’s physical properties rather than its chemistry.
“We believe that this (research) gives new insight, especially on how the topography of paper impacts the ink setting or consolidation,” explained Markko Myllys, an applied physicist at Jyvaskyla University. “This in turn helps us understand how glossy and non-glossy printed surfaces should be made.”
He thought knowledge about the topographical variations in ink and paper would help the printing industry to optimize size distribution of ink particles.
Declining Demand for Paper
Opportunities for greater efficiencies in the interactions between ink and paper are emerging at a time when total demand for paper is continuing to decrease in Europe. The European print industry is facing an urgent need to bolster consumption, particularly for graphics papers, with the most promising prospects being in specialist and premium papers.
In 2014 pulp and paper sales of members of the Confederation of European Paper Industries (CEPI), accounting for 93% of pulp and paper European output, went down by 1.1%. In the period 2014-2000, turnover of CEPI members fell by 6.2%. Much of the decrease stems from reductions in pulp production, resulting from a big increase in recycling of paper.
In 2014 production of paper and board dropped only by 0.2% to 91 million tons compared to the previous year. In 2014-2000 paper and board output in fact rose slightly by 0.3%. Production capacity of paper and board has gone up by 3.4% since the turn of the century.
However, increases in paper and board output and capacity have been due to a relatively sharp rise in exports, which have risen by 38% since 2000. Consumption of paper and board in Europe declined by 0.7% in 2014 and by 6.1% in 2014-2000, with much of the decrease due to reductions in demand for graphics paper, particularly newsprint.
Paper makers, as well as ink producers, are hoping that the steady decline in demand can be reversed by a continued switch among consumers back to paper. This will be driven by strong sales of higher quality paper grades, higher standards of printing with improvements in paper-ink synergies and the forging of closer ties between the internet and print.
“What a paper grade might lack in surface and tactile interaction can be boosted quite dramatically by the choice of inks, value-added print effects and the use of machine-readable codes to trigger online messaging,” said Terry Parry, head of technical sales at Finnish-based UPM, a leading European paper manufacturer.
One of the biggest potentials for advances in paper quality and the interfaces between paper and ink is in packaging, for which demand in Europe has increased by around 5% to 6% since the early 2000s.
Another area of bright prospects for paper and ink innovations is direct mail, which has been declining in volume in many European countries but rising in added value. Recent research in the UK, where direct mail accounts for around 14% of all advertising expenditure in the country, has shown that the returns on investment in direct mail has risen for every £1 ($1.50) from £1.50 to £4.50.
A lot of this extra value comes from relatively high response rates to direct mail as a result of high proportions of it being opened and high average periods of over two weeks for keeping the mail. Consumers are also expressing a big preference for personalized promotional mail, a growing proportion of which is all digitally printed
New Technologies
These trends in packaging and direct mail are occurring at a time when digital printing is starting to make deep inroads into sectors traditionally dominated by offset and flexo.
The expansion in digital printing, especially inkjet, is taking place as printers are beginning to have fewer concerns about its quality and above all extra costs, such as those for the inks and papers.
Paper and ink makers have been active in developing products that deal with some of the key concerns about performance through new paper coatings and surface treatments and more weather and light resistant inks.
One result has been a big rise in the number of different grades of paper, much of it for digital printing. Paper merchants have been complaining about there being so many grades they have problems in deciding which ones to stock.
“The market for specialist grades, mainly all paper but some composites of paper and polymers, has really taken off so there has been a massive increase in numbers of grades available,”said Tim Stockley, director of Colourbyte, a distributor of papers and Epson digital printers.
“There has been strong demand from in-house printers, especially among retail chains printing their own promotional material,” he added.
Perhaps the largest paper and ink innovation recently has been in high speed inkjet printing, which is now becoming a major competitor to offset and flexo for volume work.
Most of the leading paper makers in Europe have now introduced grades for high speed inkjet printing mainly based on application-specific coatings and surface treatments. These deal with challenges like ink density, ink drop spreading, drop inconsistences, print unevenesss, streaking, bleeding, color intensity and drying rates.
Some of the papers have been developed under contract with individual OEM manufacturers of digital printing presses. The OEMs distribute them to the users of the machines, while also developing, formulating and usually making their own inks for the papers.
In most printing sectors in Europe, the big task is in creating papers and inks for printed products that encourage people to access information on websites or other sources of electronic data, mostly through smart phones.
With direct mail, a key objective of marketers is to relate the content of the mail shot to online shopping. A key feature of successful direct mail has to be the feel and visual appeal of the paper, to which a major contribution is made by the quality of inks and their interaction with the paper.
There is increased use in Europe by consumers of augmented reality (AR) codes, prompted by responses to the attraction of direct mail or, in particular, packaging. These open up apps on smart phones and tablets, giving out video, audio or graphics messages.
AR has been extended to newspapers and magazines in Europe. The Newbury Weekly News, an English local newspaper with circulation of 15,000, won the best innovation prize in the UPM-sponsored International News Awards last year for an interactive page in the paper connecting the reader with an app. By hovering a mobile phone over the page, the photo – in this case one of a dinosaur – sprang to life in 3D on the phone screen.
“It’s an incredible technology that allows you to bring a car off the page and actually drive it across the desk, just as if it was a remote-controlled car,” explained James Gurney, Newbury Weekly’s chief executive.
The Saxon regional paper Saechsische Zeitung in Germany doubled its usual circulation with the publication of an issue containing 3D photos of Saxony. The edition, which was distributed with special 3D glasses, required a special UPM paper grade and different inks. The issue was judged a big success by the publishers because it caught the attention of children and adolescents who do not normally read the paper.
As Gurney said, “Everyone in the industry is searching for that silver bullets (for finding new readers), and unless we keep trying out new ideas, we’ll never find it.”
European Editor Sean Milmo is an Essex, UK-based writer specializing in coverage of the chemical industry.