Today, non-impact printers have become a common office peripheral. With this increase in market acceptance, the understanding of computer imaging has left the realm of black magic, known only by a select group of scientists and engineers, and entered into the mainstream of computer literacy.Competitive bench marking articles in popular computer magazines no longer look at just the price of the printer, how clearly the user manual describes using the software that comes with it and if the manufacturer's technical support department picks up the phone. They are beginning to look inside the device at the optical, mechanical and electronic precision as measured by output image quality.Today, manufacturers are beginning to use sophisticated machine vision software technology to evaluate image quality and set the standards for their design and manufacturing operations. Their marketing organizations are using the same technology to perform competitive analysis.Manufacturers of printers need to understand how this new technology is being applied to assure competitiveness, improve customer satisfaction and to be able to respond to the growing awareness and expectations in the marketplace regarding image quality standards. This paper will present a series of specific metrics for quantifying image quality for non-impact printers. Specific metrics will include Color registration, Color consistency, MTF, resolution, Streak noise, Text quality, Motion quality, Linearity, Sharpness, Smearing effects, Dot quality and others. Discussion will also present methods by which manufacturers have achieved a fully automatic image quality testing process. Case studies and Downloaded From: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 06/15/2016 Terms of Use: http://spiedigitallibrary.org/ss/TermsOfUse.aspx

Imaging and measurement of drops-in-flight often relies on the measurement system's ability to drive the print head directly in order to synchronize the strobe for repeatable image capture. In addition, many systems do not have the necessary combination of strobe control and image analysis for full drop-in-flight evaluation.This paper includes a discussion of an integrated machine-vision based system for visualization and measurement of drops-in-flight that can be used with any frequency-based jetting system. The strobe is linked to the firing frequency of the print head, so while it is synchronized, it is independent of the specific print head being inspected.The imaging system resolves droplets down to 2 picoliters in volume at the highest zoom level. And an open architecture software package allows for image collection and archiving as well as powerful and flexible image analysis. This paper will give an overview of the details of this system as well as show some of the system capabilities through several examples of drop-in-flight analysis.

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