Zooming Toward Quality

According to Engledow, Fife's narrow- and wide-web systems both offer the same range of traverse speeds and fields of view for flexibility, but one setting will not fit all. He cautions that a wider field of view won't provide the resolution to view fine print or dot structure of process work.

Another reason to seek out a system that matches a press's parameters is the definitive split between narrow- and wide-web inspection priorities. Jim Doerr, vice president sales and marketing at TruColor Video Systems, LaGrange, GA, says narrow-web applications emphasize cost-effectiveness and general print defects such as misregister, starving ink and hickeys. A lower-end system with manual camera positioning, iris-focus-zoom for magnification, automatic scanning in the web direction, and a compact 12à x 4à camera housing is a common solution, he says.