Can digital printing replace traditional printing technology in the future label industry?

With the economic development and 4.0 industrial technology, more and more traditional technologies are replaced by new technologies. The traditional printing industry is facing the challenge of digital printing technology. Can digital printing completely replace traditional printing technology? Let's look down.

Digital printing is a new printing technology that uses prepress system to transmit graphic information directly to digital printing machine through network for printing.

In other words, the input is a digital stream of graphic information, and the output is also a digital stream of graphic information. It should be emphasized that it is printed on demand, plateless printing. Digital printing means that electronic documents are directly transmitted to the printing machine by the computer, which saves the steps of color separation, imposition, plate making and trial operation. More simply, it is to record digital graphic information on paper or tangible media by using some technology or scientific and technological means.

What can digital printing bring?

In recent years, the practice of digital printing in the field of labels has proved that digital printing has the following advantages:

1, label making pretreatment time is short, preparation work is less, and delivery is timely.

2. The printing cycle is short, which is suitable for small-scale order processing (the length of printed materials is usually 200 ~ 1500m).

3. Wide application range, which can be used for small batch orders, variable information coding such as two-dimensional codes, logistics management, product traceability, marketing, etc.

4, the boot preparation time is short, unlike traditional printing, which uses a lot of printing paper, and the material cost is low.

5. Less raw material consumption and low storage cost.

The above advantages bring greater flexibility and benefits to label buyers, such as the relatively low price of small batch orders and the excellent quality and stability of finished labels. Therefore, even if the salary is higher, the label buyer is more acceptable. For printing enterprises, if digital printing is adopted, the average profit of orders will be higher.

Can digital printing replace traditional printing?

Although digital printing has brought a lot of convenience and innovation, it is undoubtedly one of the future development trends. However, compared with traditional printing, digital printing still has some obvious shortcomings, mainly including the following:

1, print quality, including resolution, dot size, color space range, etc. Still limited.

2. The usability of the system needs to be improved, mainly because of the high maintenance cost, the need for additional automatic calibration and cleaning of the circulation system and the poor overall stability.

3. The printing speed is relatively low, and the monochrome printing speed can be comparable to that of the traditional printing machine, but the color printing can't.

4. Overprinting accuracy is average. For large-area CMYK four-color printing and the reproduction of PANTONE color space with extended color gamut (plus GOV), the index of overprinter accuracy is very important.

5. The choice of printing materials is limited, such as shrink film, in-mold label material, embossed paper, etc.

6. The adhesion fastness, friction resistance, low migration and light resistance of the ink layer are all low.

7. Online production (from raw materials to finished product labels) is prone to problems, and there is still a lack of valuable online processing solutions for digital printing.

From this point of view, the digital printing market of China label industry will also exist objectively because of its particularity, and it will embark on a road of development with China characteristics.

Practical application of label digital printing

The digital development process of China's label industry has been very slow, which is mainly due to the lack of digital printing equipment that can really be accepted by small and medium-sized label printing enterprises with huge base in the market.

At present, the label digital printing market in China is not optimistic. Generally speaking, not only the equipment price is too high, but also the intangible upgrade cost in the later period is uncontrollable. Therefore, for label printing enterprises, the introduction of digital printing equipment basically belongs to crossing the river by feeling the stones, relying solely on courage.

From the practical application situation, at present, in China label industry, digital printing is mostly used for variable anti-counterfeiting information printing, proofing and short order processing, while personalized application can not support large-scale application of digital printing except for individual orders because the number of repeated orders is uncontrollable.

In a word, at present, digital printing is not enough to become the pillar production technology of labels, but more for the special application of market segments, coexisting with traditional label production technology. At present, the main production equipment in the label industry is still traditional printing equipment such as flexographic printing machine, intermittent PS printing machine and relief printing machine.

For a long time to come, the label industry in China will be characterized by the coexistence of various traditional printing technologies and digital printing technologies, each with its own strengths, so as to meet the needs of various subdivided application markets. As far as digital printing itself is concerned, although various imaging technologies will continue to improve and mature on the existing basis, I think the final digital printing of labels will still be fixed on inkjet technology and toner technology! Although it is still too early to say, let's wait and see!