Canon has announced a significant upgrade to the inspection system for its imagePRESS C10010VP Series digital colour press.
As well as verifying image quality, the enhanced system can now also automatically detect imperfections in printed barcodes, QR codes, variable data, such as alphanumerical characters in serial numbers and postcodes, and some typographical symbols.
According to the company, this development makes the imagePRESS C10010VP Series the only toner colour production printer in its market segment with this level of detection capability. This, it added, frees skilled operators from repetitive and time-consuming manual inspection, reducing errors and turnaround time and assuring production quality.
“Automation is becoming increasingly critical to our higher volume production print customers, enabling them to streamline functional processes, minimise the scope for error and ensure absolute consistency and continuity,” said Hiro Imamura, Vice President, Document Solutions Marketing & Innovation at Canon Europe.
“This added level of optional press automation substantially extends the capabilities of the imagePRESS C10010VP for businesses producing transactional print and direct mail. It also provides invaluable assurance for any organisation, for example in logistics, that regularly uses barcodes to manage its workflows and where it’s crucial that this printed data is flawless to ensure that onward processes run seamlessly.”
The inspection system scans every printed page for imperfections, such as streaks and dirt on the media. Customers can automate the system to check all pages, send faulty ones to the escape tray and automatically reprint them for perfect output without affecting productivity, or reject the pages without reprinting. Alternatively, the operator can simply receive a log of the pages which fell short of the pre-set quality benchmark.
Users can set up automatic checks on up to 32 areas of an image and up to 30 areas of a transactional page, including any variable data. As a further safeguard, the printed data can also be checked against reference data in a CSV file, decoding the barcode or QR code and ensuring it matches the master data.
According to Canon, the enhanced inspection system can detect faults as small as 0.2mm diameter without impacting productivity and extending automated checks beyond image inspection to numerical data, from as small as 6pt up to 24pt.
