RSI

Industrial Inkjet Printers

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Dan

Recent U.S. Tobacco Legislation

H.R. 1256 is the FAMILY SMOKING PREVENTIONAND TOBACCO CONTROL ACT that the President recently signed in to law. I have been tracking this legislation for 12 months in its various forms from Waxman to Kennedy, as well as the House and Senate versions.

In regards to Tracking and Tracing and this legislation, there have been a number of changes over time. This version of the ACT has a more abbreviated section when compared to previous. Some directives specifically related to RFID have been removed… Continue

Posted by Dan on December 18, 2009 at 1:17pm

Jim Constantine

Traversing Printhead

RSI recently successfully installed a traversing printhead application. No, not a half-inch printhead traversing twelve inches or so, but a four-inch high printhead traversing over five feet!

The end-user wanted to print on their substrate once the material came to a stop at the end of their conveyor line. They needed to print 4-inch tall, bold characters in red ink. Not a problem for RSI. With Daryl Turner's engineering ingenuity and Eric Patterson's field installation expertise, the RSI tande… Continue

Posted by Jim Constantine on December 14, 2009 at 4:08pm

Eric Patterson

Embracing Differences

RSI's new MVP line of controllers has really taken off! We've had great feedback from customers and industry!

Some folks new to the product line have asked for an easy way to describe the differences as we go from the basic MVP into an MVP Plus and then MVP Pro.

The differences can be summed up in 3 basic features of any printing system: Look (Font, placement, etc), Information (static, data, i/o, dynamic, etc) and Print Height.

MVP - the basic controller uses static templates. No fields can… Continue

Posted by Eric Patterson on October 31, 2009 at 12:00pm — 1 Comment

David Chee

Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI): Is Inkjet case printing in or out of the game?

First of all we need to know this: PTI is NOT a law. It is an initiative sponsored by the Produce Marketing Association, United Fresh Produce Association and The Canadian Produce Marketing Association, as a standard definition for product identification in 2008.The reason for such initiative is that the industry prefers a standard that they create rather than leaving it to the federal government which might intervene and mandate one. The PTI establishes a standardized system to label every case… Continue

Posted by David Chee on October 30, 2009 at 11:39am — 1 Comment

Jim Constantine

Up-Front Cost

The choice to purchase less than heavy-duty equipment is solely to reduce up-front cost. But that decision will lead to higher maintenance cost over time. If you need to continuously run equipment, the downtime can certainly be a far higher cost.

As noted in the most recent success story found on the RSI web site under the CASE CODING tab, "Every piece of equipment will go down at some point. How fast you can get it back up is the key."

A recent Packaging Digest article agrees. "When you don't… Continue

Posted by Jim Constantine on October 30, 2009 at 8:20am

David Don

iPhone

As some of you know, RSI employees are equipped with the iPhone over the past year. During that time, it has become an essential tool for us to communicate with our customers and other employees. The phone allows us to take pictures and send them to our engineers from the field, receive emails and respond even when we are on the road and away from our PC's, surf the web, and text message. I'd like to expand the use of our phones further and here are a few requests:

1. Use the iphone as a USB dr… Continue

Posted by David Don on October 16, 2009 at 4:36am — 1 Comment

David Chee

What does the MTBF or MTTF specification given by manufacturers mean?

Often you will find a Mean Time between Failure (MTBF) specification given by manufacturers on their printhead or print engine. So what does MTBF mean?
Mean time between failures (MTBF) is the mean (average) time between failures of a system, and is often considered the "useful life" of the device i.e. not including 'infant mortality' or 'end of life' if the device is not repairable. Calculations of MTBF assume that a system is "renewed", i.e. fixed, after each failure, and then returned to serv… Continue

Posted by David Chee on June 25, 2009 at 11:21am

David Don

PRINTING COMPLIANT BAR CODES ON SECONDARY PACKAGES

Great article that sums up our business...

This article is taken from PMT

http://www.pmtdirect.com/website/article.asp?id=3811

PRINTING COMPLIANT BAR CODES ON SECONDARY PACKAGES
THE GLOBAL TRADE ITEM NUMBER IS USELESS IF IT DOESN'T CONFORM TO INTERNATIONAL PRINTING STANDARDS
BY RICK FOX

If the U.S. Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry is ever going to benefit from sharing supply chain information between trading partners, the current status of the quality of GS1 Global Trade Item Number (G… Continue

Posted by David Don on June 2, 2009 at 8:40am — 5 Comments

Tom Meutsch

Capital Equipment Justification: Key Tax Issues

The justification for purchase of capital equipment goes way beyond simple payback numbers in many companies today. While "Payback" is a good rule of thumb, the Return On Investment (ROI) calculations used in financial departments uses other internal factors to help determine the viability of the project and the ultimate justification for equipment acquisition. One of those factors is the current and future equipment book values over the ROI period based upon tax code and depreciation schedules.… Continue

Posted by Tom Meutsch on June 1, 2009 at 11:29am — 1 Comment

Jim Constantine

The importance of using the right scanner when comparing label barcodes vs. inkjet barcodes

When verifying an inkjet bar code printed directly on corrugated cartons, the ANSI specs call for the use of a 20mil aperture lens. Many label verifiers are either a 6 or 7 mil aperture and are overly critical of the natural defects in the corrugated board. ANSI specs call for the 20mil pen. It is less aggressive and does not pick up the corrugate imperfections as does the more aggressive label verifier.

Direct bar code printing on corrugated boxes has been an accepted standard for 15 ye… Continue

Posted by Jim Constantine on May 27, 2009 at 8:00pm — 1 Comment

 
 

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