<title>Image quality metrics for printers/plotters</title>

Abstract

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

Combine 1D and 3D color calibration methods for ensuring consistent color reproduction

“…There are several different ways to measure the color consistency 10,11 . In order to exclude the inherent system error, we used the grand average of L*a*b* over all tested printers as the reference, and then calculated the color differences ∆ E 94 between the color produced by each printer and the grand average.…”

Identification of Printing Process Using HSV Colour Space

“…In 1993 Lofgen [8] worked on HPLC analysis of printing inks as a non-destructive technique. Yair's work [11] on classifying printers using colour registration, resolution, text quality, line quality and dot quality is also often quoted in forensic journals.…”

Reproduction in Three-Dimensional Ink Jet Printing

“…The dot quality test provides information about the spatial and morphological variations of the dots. 7 The scope of the work presented here is to obtain basic information about reproduction of the surface elements in relation to different printing preferences and object position in three-dimensional ink jet printing, and to study the application of image analysis as a technique for objective evaluation.…”