Where is the screen printing road

Today, there is a consensus among printmakers all over the world that digital technology has fundamentally changed the traditional printing technology. Its significance is no less than that of laser photocopying in place of lead and fire. It can be said that printing has occurred since the invention of movable type printing. The most significant technological change.

In the screen printing industry, CTS fundamentally changed the traditional screen making process and made the prepress data directly into a screen printing plate. Digital printing such as inkjet printing, electrophotography, color copying, etc. greatly simplifies the workflow from prepress to printing, directly affects the future development of the screen printing industry, and brings tremendous changes to screen printing.

The main trends in the current screen printing market are:

Digital printing and screen printing have both competition and cooperation

Efficient UV curing system increases screen printing speed

Digital technology simplifies screen printing process

Short preparation time, fast delivery, and short cycle to market;

Short version to meet personalized needs, print on demand

Both prices and profits are depressed;

The competition between different printing processes is becoming more intense

From the current market share of various foreign printing processes, we can see that by the year of 2005, digital printing still has a strong momentum of development. It will continue to penetrate the market of other printing processes and rapidly expand its market share. .

In the face of the impact and impact brought by digital printing, screen printing, like other traditional printing, faces a severe test. To cope with this situation, we are faced with challenges and a detailed understanding of the application of digital printing in various fields of screen printing. ,necessary.

Digital printing in large format graphic printing

What is the format of the large-format digital printing market? This is a problem for large format printing manufacturers and users. In recent years, due to the progress of digital imaging technology and the decline in the price of energy consumed, this market is constantly growing, especially the large-format printing market is getting bigger and better. It is estimated that the global digital printing market in 2003 has reached more than 2,000 billion dollars. Compared with traditional printing, the large-format digital printing market in Asia is also growing rapidly. According to the survey, the annual growth rate of this market should be at least 30%. At present, the rate of its growth has not shown signs of slowing down.

In the large-format graphics market, inkjet has become the fourth largest technology in batch printing, second only to screen printing, offset printing and computer-aided labeling. Inkjet ranks second in terms of creating profits for manufacturers and distributors of the graphic printing industry. We predict that ink jet printing will rank first in terms of output value in the future.

With the advent of platform digital inkjet printers, it provides greater versatility for printing various substrates with various thicknesses, soft or hard. According to a recent report, by 2005, the number of installed platform inkjet printers will exceed 4,200. In the world, these printers consume nearly 33 million U.S. dollars worth of UV-curable inks, a 10-fold increase from the current level.

In Europe, the large-format graphics printing market is still growing at a rate of more than 15% per year, but the total number of large-format print and imaging suppliers, including sign makers, is slowly declining. In the past, a small number of screen printers and signage companies could control the local small market. Users usually come to their own homes. Nowadays, the emergence of digital technology has broken the balance. If you only need a few different multi-color posters, you can go to a digital printing company. If you want to print more than 200 outdoor posters, go to the screen printing factory. In the highly competitive environment, some enterprises are not very professional, and companies lacking foresight are declining. In many countries and enterprises, competition is intensifying, prices are declining, and more specialized companies continue to grow and thrive.

Digital printing in the packaging field

As early as 1993, digital printing began to be used in commercial printing, such as printing brochures, documents, direct mail, etc. For the packaging industry, digital printing is still an unfamiliar new technology. Today, digital printing is being applied to three major packaging materials, namely the packaging of label folded cartons and flexible packaging materials.

At present, most of the digital presses used in the packaging industry are narrow web (50 cm wide or narrower) web presses. Now North America, the use of digital printing machine printing packaging materials is less than 1% of the total application prospects are very broad . Research institutions predict that the use of digital printing in packaging will increase by 20% per year between now and 2007.

For most digital presses or suppliers

For their part, they rank second in the packaging market, second only to commercial printing. In the early days of digital printing, the focus of research and development was on the four-color mesh of paper. In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to the printing of spot colors and non-paper materials. Digital printing technology has been able to meet the needs of the packaging industry, and some businesses are gradually Digital color printing.

Digital printing is also suitable for experimental sales of packaging or label printing. With only a few keyboards, the packaging design can be changed and different graphics can be produced. This will make the cost of trial production of small production volumes more economical. This will be digital color printing. A non-negligible application in the field.

The obvious advantage of digital printing is that each image it produces can be independent. This means that the text, graphics and arrangement of each package or label can be different.

Of course, as with any new emerging technology, digital printing has some limitations that need to be resolved. The first is the high cost, and the second is the retraining of customer service and prepress staff in the digital workflow.

In addition, digital printers are more expensive than normal printers, whether they are purchased, used, or maintained.

High price: A four-color inkjet printer costs several times more than comparable flexo printers. High operating costs: The operating costs of digital presses are higher than those of ordinary printers, and there is no conclusion about the service life of digital presses used in the packaging field. Traditional printers have a long service life, and digital presses are too new. The technology can not accurately predict their useful life, but it does not seem to be as long as the corresponding traditional printing presses. The traditional printing press should be a mechanical gear transmission, while the digital printing press involves more microprocessors and electronic devices.

The operating cost of digital presses is relatively high because the cost of toners and inks is higher than that of conventional flexo and offset printing, and the specific differences depend on the amount of print. The UV ink used for ink jet printing is approximately US$200/L, the toner cost is approximately US$0.85/m2 at a coverage of 85%, and the cost for consumables is 0.74 US cents/m2 for printing materials, and printing The price of materials is about 30% higher.

Higher maintenance costs: Due to the need for more frequent maintenance and maintenance, the maintenance cost of digital presses is higher than that of conventional presses. Digital presses must operate in a clean environment, and cleaning operations are more frequent than conventional presses.

Digital printing of textiles

Textile ink-jet printing has a history of 10 years. The range of colors that can be achieved is similar to that of traditional textile printing. It has excellent lightfastness and fastness.

One of the biggest characteristics of digital textile printing is personalization. It can print garments with personalized elements, such as logos, designs or specific names, and become a new production method for displaying images on textiles.

Now, digital technology can be used to print and decorate a variety of textiles by jetting dyes or inks directly onto textiles by ink jet, or by printing patterns on paper with inkjet and electrostatic methods, and then transferring the inks. To fabrics, currently in Europe and the United States, digital inkjet printing is used to transfer decals and printing directly on fabrics and textiles is increasing. However, screen printing and printing still dominate this field, especially in Asian developing countries.

CD, VCD decor printing

At present, CD, VCD and related media mainly use screen printing, but in foreign countries, there are already thousands of machines and hundreds of companies operating in this field. At the same time, UV offset printing and pad printing have invaded the field of CD decoration, but screen printing still dominates. At present, the application of inkjet technology in CD decoration is limited to the home and office market. Some CD manufacturers also invest in specialized screen printing equipment. Perhaps it is their prediction that in the next 10 years, the business of CD and VCD will increase a lot.

However, as digital storage technologies and packet density continue to grow exponentially, in the near future, people will be able to obtain the required information through cable satellites. At this time, the demand for “hard” data storage of CDs and VCDs will increase. Greatly reduced, and the application of digital printing will gradually increase.

PCB printing

In the field of PCB printing, especially in mass-produced areas such as Asia, screen printing is still the main printing method for main images (line resists), solder resists and markings, and symbols. For the mark symbol printing, inkjet is a good non-contact printing method, there is no doubt that the mark symbol inkjet printing system currently being developed will take away some market from screen printing, and currently on the PCB Whether the printing method of the wire solder resist will survive or be doubtful because, as the electronic communications industry shifts to higher density, lighter systems, the products will be smaller and cannot be imaged by screen printing methods. The inkjet method may play a role. For example, today's Silicon Valley uses a special-purpose inkjet printer MPM metalJet to print 1 micron solder joints on thin silicon wafers to connect the chips. In this regard, screen printing is also powerless. .

In a word, the digital printing market is obviously expanding. It is not only reflected in the market of large-scale advertisements and posters, but digital printing has also been successfully used in textiles and packaging printing. Because digital printing is suitable for textiles and packaging printing. Since digital printing is applicable to printing materials of various sizes and various materials, it can be widely used in containers, commercial exhibitions, light boxes, theater and movie curtains, CDs, VCDs, circuit boards and the like. Recently, the British Museum in London will also use digital inkjet for reproduction of fine art collections for tourists to purchase and collect. In short, digital printing can do most of what the screen can do.

Where is the screen printing road

Screen printing will not be destroyed, but can only develop in competition.

The current reality is that digital printing, especially ink jet technology, has been greatly developed. Today, digital imaging has accounted for 15% of the total global large-scale graphics production, which has affected the growth of screen printing in certain businesses. , But it did not destroy the screen printing industry, but also provided some services for screen printing.

Eighty-nine years ago, foreigners predicted that the output of digital printing would increase exponentially, and screen printing would be eliminated by the year 2000. However, it now appears that the Digital Predictions ignores two aspects when making predictions. First, the expansion of digital technology has some technical limitations, and there are still problems with speed and quality. Second, they did not expect screen printing technology to respond so quickly to this threat.

Looking at the status quo of foreign screen printing in recent years. It can be seen that the emergence of digital printing technology and the rapid development of other digital technologies have greatly stimulated the screen printing technology and promoted the transformation of screen printing in three major areas:

First, digital printing is immediately adopted in the pre-press process for screen printing. Currently, digital prepress processing accounts for 95% of the total prepress operations for screen printing.

Second, the CTS direct screen printing plate technology appeared on screen printing, enabling users to directly make images on the screen without the need for expensive film in the traditional photolithography process;

Third, the success of narrow-web roll multi-color label printers has promoted the development of large-format multicolor printers (1.5mx2.15m and above) using 2, 4 or even 5 color UV inks, and improved screen printing speeds. And quality, enhanced