Digitization in Screen Printing Process

With the continuous development of digital technology and the ever-increasing demand for digitization in the printing industry, from digital proofing to computer-to-plate (CTP) technology, digitalization replaces the lengthy processes of traditional film making and printing. It not only saves time, but also saves a lot of expenses, and is well received by the printing industry and customers. At the same time, digitalization also brings updated information for the screen printing process.

Let's take a look at the filming process of the past: the color separation of the manuscript, and the imposition of the picture and the text by hand. The film is obtained by exposing, developing, fixing, washing, and drying the photosensitive film. Exposure to control a certain exposure time, water wash can not let the water temperature difference is too large, heating and drying to ensure that the temperature, not through the high, this series of points must rely on the operator's ability and experience, the proportion of manual operation at a glance . In particular, the imposition is a collage of various scattered texts, graphics, and images in accordance with the specifications. This kind of craft requires the staff to be meticulous, careful, a little negligence will make a mistake.

The emergence of the Color Desktop Publishing System (CDTP), a color desktop publishing system, has made screen printers look fresh. It makes text typesetting, graphic image input, image color separation and screening, layout design, deformation processing, creative design, fully automatic computer processing, well-deserved "digital prepress system." Compared to the conventional method, in the digital prepress system, the exposure process of the photosensitive material is performed in the laser image-setter, and the processes of developing, fixing, washing, drying, etc. are all completed in the automatic film-sweeping machine.



Source: Bison

At present, with the development of inkjet printing and laser printing technology, it is possible to directly output the printing plate printing film using an ink jet printer or a laser printer, so that the output screen printing four-color film has a solid bottom density and overprinting accuracy. The output of the film is clear and the dots are neat and tidy. And can output large format screen printing color separation. Output can also set the network frequency, screen angle.

From the above discussion, it can be seen that the digital prepress system has many advantages compared to the traditional plate making method:

1. Graphic and text processing. Text, graphics, and images are all entered into the computer. The layout is designed in the computer to avoid errors or errors caused by manual operations.

2. Easy to modify. Modifications such as deformation, splitting, and superimposition become simple and easy;

3. Can be creatively designed. In the computer's graphic image processing software, only you can't think of, and you can't do many artistic effects that you couldn't;

4. The layout effect can be displayed on the computer screen, which is convenient for the customer to check, and is also convenient for the operator to modify;

5. Fast, save manpower and material resources;

6. The layout information is stored in various ways and is not easily damaged or lost. In addition, layout information can be disseminated through the Internet to facilitate the exchange of opinions with customers;

7. There is no process such as developing and fixing, and no dark room operation is required. It does not use many chemicals and does not pollute the environment.

From the above discussion, we have seen the changes brought about by digitization to the film production process. In fact, the further spread of digitization has already abandoned the use of film. This is the CTP direct plate making technology. It outputs the digitized graphic information directly to the printing plate, and through some processing, the printing plate can be obtained.

This technology is fast in making plates, saving film, saving labor, dot resolution and print quality. Only the current price of the CTP plate-making machine is still relatively expensive, and it is not affordable for general SMEs.

At the same time, the rise of inkjet technology allows the layout information to be output directly by inkjet printers. It not only eliminates platemaking, but also completes multi-version printing at a time. The output format of the inkjet printer is large, it is suitable for many mediums, it has strong color rendering ability, and reproduction scale is more than screen printing. It gradually becomes the main production of large-scale billboards and becomes the new favorite of advertising companies.