Capturing Digital Décor

In "Single-Pass Inkjet and the Wide World of Décor," Eileen Fritsch dicusses high-speed industrial inkjet technology’s expansion into décor applications. Here, she details how one company is helping grow the market.

One company that can enable the growth of digital printing onto decorative surfaces is Metis High Quality Scanners. Industrial printers can use data captured by the Metis scanner to reproduce the surfaces and textures of different types of wood, stone, bricks, and leathers.

The Metis DRS 2000 scanner can capture resolutions up to 3600 ppi from multiple angles with carefully synchronized lighting. The Metis Synchrolight scanning process and software can capture, isolate, and deliver very high-resolution, pixel-to-pixel, in-register surface data. Four temperature-controlled LED light banks in the Metis Synchrolight system work to ensure objective, consistent, and repeatable color. The scanner can capture originals that are up to 79 x 48 inches in area and up to 7.9 inches thick. Rob Lawrence, director of sales for Metis, contends that previous scanning systems “had fallen short of giving designers, manufacturers, and ad marketers the critical [data] needed to produce the highly realistic surfaces their customers are demanding.”

Metis scanner data can also be used to provide accurate images for marketing materials, such as printed and online catalogs and augmented-reality apps that enable interior designers to preview how a specific laminate might look in a particular location. The technology was originally developed to help the Vatican capture and preserve some of the world’s most cherished culture heritage materials.

Metis scanners are manufactured in Italy and distributed in the US by CGS Publishing Technologies.