Specialty Printing — Paper and Ink Going Digitial

How the market will shape up is still speculation at this point because even the pioneers don’t have many of the answers yet, and they are keeping what is known under wraps. Scaling up from a pilot project to commercial production tends to be fraught with surprises.

Quantum Paper, in Bloomfield Hills, MI, is the one company to have gone public with plans to roll out a technology that “marries conventional, paper-based (offset) printing with electronics.” It reports being able to produce electronic paper using standard litho printing on top of a base applied in a screen printing process or entirely via flexo printing with specialized equipment. In either case, multiple layers of conductive ink are printed onto paper (or other substrates).