The Document Security Laboratory of State Printing House Plc has developed a new type of the ink-jet ink product family in 2007. Unlike conventional inks, the new inks have absorbing characteristics in the near infrared territory so they can be applied as a successful document and product protection solution.
The commercially available coloured ink-jet inks and the black “photo inks” do not absorb in the near infrared territory so an ink with different characteristics may offer adequate protection against counterfeiting. It is also worth to consider the circumstance that the use of infrared picture-converting devices as inspection tools is not so wide-spread like the UV lamp used to verify fluorescence.
The new ink family is available in yellow, magenta and cyan colours but it is possible to mix other direct colours as well. The ink recipes were developed for BCI-6 and CLI-8 type Canon printers with ink cartridges but they can be converted to other printer types as well.
Possible areas of use:
The inks in themselves are suitable for adequate level protection of documents to be printed with water-based inks, for example for the printing of the data page of passports and the machine readable fields (MRZ) of other documents. As far as we know, the machine readable fields are printed only with black colour nowadays, as the appropriate optical characteristic of the print can be ensured only in this way. As a result of our development, this can be ensured with colour print as well from now on. Counterfeits made with colour printers or copy machines can be filtered out when with the IR reader, there is no need for a separate verification of origin.
The application of such metamer ink pairs is also possible whose colour is identical in the visible territory while they act differently in the near infrared territory. One of the inks absorbs in the IR territory while the other does not absorb. As a result, the print made with joint application of the two inks cannot be reproduced by photocopying and different hidden graphical elements and information can be placed on the print.
The application of the technology is very easy and highly effective. For example, the place of bar code on a print on paper can be covered with such an ink whose absorption in the infrared territory is minimal. The barcode itself should be printed with another ink which absorbs in the infrared territory. The two ‘colours’ are almost identical in the visible territory so the copy machines cannot make a distinction between them. The copy will show such a rectangle that contains no information. Contrarily, the data carried by the original print can be detected and processed with an appropriate infrared bar code reader.
For further information, please contact:
Ms Nikoletta Sajó
sales representative
Phone: +361 431 1317
Fax.: +361 431 1344
E-mail: sajo@any.hu