Digimarc

[WI-Flexo]

Have a customer interested in adding a watermark element to their artwork using Digimarc (Digimarc (DMRC) | The Barcode of Everything). Have any printers, Flexo or otherwise had any success with this system? Seems to be very little info available outside of Digimarc sales stuff and the other info we have found has not looked very promising. Any insight would be appreciated!
Thanks!

 

[print4life]

Have a customer interested in adding a watermark element to their artwork using Digimarc (Digimarc (DMRC) | The Barcode of Everything). Have any printers, Flexo or otherwise had any success with this system? Seems to be very little info available outside of Digimarc sales stuff and the other info we have found has not looked very promising. Any insight would be appreciated!
Thanks!

I Have used on digital presses no problem. Haven't heard anything on flexo, what have you found that doesn't sound promising? would love to get smarter as I think this might end up being very important to this industry, and all I've heard (again, only on digital) is very positive

 

[WI-Flexo]

Thanks for the info. I could see where it could be successful on digital. The technology itself seems pretty cool. Some of the negatives I have heard are that the process degrades your image quality by adding noise and increases the size of the images about 150%, so you end up with bloated files that suffer quality. Ken Rockwell had a pretty good writeup on image quality using Digimarc. Spot colors need to be rebuilt as 4 color or even 5 color builds which introduces moire and registration issues. White areas of a package need to be printed with a light 3 color tint so you lose true white areas. Slight out of register print will cause the product to be unscannable.

Having a hard time finding much positive info on the process. I was hoping to find someone running offset or flexo that has had some success and tell me it is not as bad as it sounds.
Thanks.

 

[print4life]

Interesting, thanks for the detail. Are you hearing these issues are actually impacting the yield rates or even the ability to run through certain lines, or is it just a pain in the a$$ that while frustrating is solvable without being too cost prohibitive?

By the way it is important to point out that Ken Rockwell piece is 11 years old if you didn't notice, I can tell you firsthand the technology has advanced a lot since then and I don't think those concerns are really relevant, but a lot of your concerns seem to be more about the actual flexo/offset printing of the images, which wasn't an area he touched on

 

[Michael Shannon]

We've been testing Digimarc technology for about 3 years now... We've conducted press characterizations and post-print performance using gravure, flexo, offset, digital, and even metal decorating with successful results (albeit metal does present some unique challenges). Like any new innovation, it requires an in-depth understanding and thoughtful planning from a design standpoint. I liken it to extended gamut printing, where designing for the process is critical to exploiting all the benefits; and there are many benefits. Watermarking is exploding with all of our clients, and we love driving this kind of innovation...