Assessment of plain paper printability by office ink jet printers

This paper describes tests which have been developed to measure a number of quality metrics relevant to ink jet printing on plain paper. Analytical test targets were printed on paper manufactured with different levels of surface and internal sizing treatment according to a statistical design. The prints were made using several commercially available ink jet printers. Images of microscope and scanner targets were analyzed using ImageXpert(TM), an image analysis system. The resulting data could be used to optimize sizing levels for maximum effectiveness in achieving good print quality performance.