Effect of paper optical characteristics on tonal gradation reproduction in inkjet printing

Abstract

Paper characteristics are important determinants to print quality, especially the optical characteristics of paper to color reproduction. In order to analyze the correlation between characteristic details and results, a simulation experiment was conducted. Five kinds of paper in three major categories were selected and three major optical characteristics, including whiteness, opacity, and chromaticity, were detected. Then a standard digital test format was printed with digital inkjet printer to optimize the output color quality. The tone reproduction and color gamut accuracy were analyzed by comparing the tonal gradation of primary color, secondary color and tertiary color. And the color gamut was created by Verify module in EFI software and was compared by pairwise comparison analysis. Finally, the primary relationships between paper optical characteristics and tone reproduction were summarized tentatively. The experimental results show that paper whiteness and chromaticity have a significant effect on tone reproduction, yet the effect of opacity is not obvious. This study provides good foundation to further mechanism study in the future work.