Effect of Paper Sizing on Print Quality in Business and Office Non-Impact Printing, 1995 Papermakers Conference Proceedings

Jens Borch Lexmark International This paper reviews the effect of paper sizing on print quality in electrophotographic and ink jet printing. These are the major non-impact printing processes used in the business and office environment where plain paper is desirable due to economy and availability. Electrophotographic copying and printing require ade-quate fusing fix to present a well-defined image suitable for further handling and processing (e.g. bar code reading). Relatively low sizing levels (slack sizing) are desirable for unprinted paper. How-ever, preprinted forms may require more sizing due to the traditio-nal impact printing processes used before non-impact printing. Generally, the sizing level is much more critical for ink jet printing than for electrophotographic printing due to sheet penetration by water-based inks. The sizing level needs to be adjusted according to the desired ink jet image. That is, full color printing requires ink penetration rates sufficient to accommodate each of the process inks applied without color bleed or other ink-to-ink interaction pro-cesses This may be at expense of character and line print quality that is affected by fiber swelling in monochrome color printing.