Material testing is an important part of any company's production processes. With ink and newsprint making up more than 50% of the material costs, printing operations should ensure that their materials are indeed up to the task and standards required.

Charter of the Centre

• Acts as an independent institute
• Identify the characteristics of materials and consumables of printing houses
• Create comparable test results across the industry
• Trouble shooting: Compare delivery against specifications
• Qualifies new materials in comparison to already used materials
• Bring out industry research reports

The Centre aims to help solve common print problems found in newspaper printing.

Testing services offered

The Centre offers the following testing services:

1. Conformance of Newsink to ISO 2846-2

A scientific study to find the conformance of Newsink to ISO 2846-2, ISO standard for cold-set web-offset inks.

2. Basic & Optical Characteristics

• Grammage
• Paper shade
• Printed colour values (ink on paper)
• Print density
• Fineness of ink

3. Printability Testing

• Ink requirement
• Print through
• Colour picking
• Wet on wet printing with two colours
• Set off
• Strike through

4. Quality Evaluation Service (QES)

Print quality evaluation service is a need-based service from the WAN-IFRA Research and Material Testing Centre, India, to assess the quality of newspaper print reproduction. This service aims to help the participants stay in conformance with ISO 12647-3 consistently.

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Research reports

WAN-IFRA Research and Material Testing Centre is committed to carry out research on topics specific to Indian newspaper industry. In the last two years, the centre has conducted research on newsprint and newsink problems specific to Indian news publishing industry. The topics include

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