Kodak fights wine industry fraud

The wine industry is turning to Kodak printing technology to protect premium wines from fraud, that it says could affect up to 5% of wines sold in secondary markets, says Print Week.

Winemakers in Napa Valley, California, have adopted new anti-counterfeiting technology from Kodak that utilises invisible markers added to printing inks, paper and other packaging elements that are detectable only with proprietary handheld readers.

Steve Powell, GM and director of security solutions at Kodak's Graphic Communications Group, said: "Wine fraud is a rising problem that threatens to seriously damage the premium wine industry. These industry leaders are taking proactive steps to address the problem now."

A new Israeli printing technology will enable printing 1 000 pages a minute at affordable prices, by removing the limitation of the rate at which ink can be transferred from the ink source to the page, reports Israel21c.

Developed by two researchers from The College of Judea and Samaria, the technology, dubbed Jetrix, enables simultaneous high-speed printing of an entire page of text. The technology combines printing and liquid crystal technology methods to make a page-sized printing array that emits ink instead of light.

"We are reducing the limitations of printing heads," explains Moshe Einat, senior lecturer at the college's Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

A new process from Xerox allows commercial printers to print fluorescent words and numbers on documents using standard toner on ordinary white paper, reports Technology Review.

The process leverages the fluorescence that already exists in many kinds of white paper, and selectively exposes or covers the paper using different colour combinations to arrive at the same shade.

Researchers at Xerox have come up with a way to use standard printers to add fluorescent words and images, analogous to ID marks on currency that are visible only under ultraviolet light, to ordinary documents. The technology could make it inexpensive to add hidden codes to documents like cheques, coupons and transcripts.