Ink Industry - Talk about Gravure (Part 2)

Digital development prospect In the field of digital prepress technology, gravure has made faster progress than flexo printing. Mr. Kelly said: “The cost of gravure printing continues to decrease, while the cost of flexo printing continues to increase. Gravure printing on the equipment side is continuing to make technological progress to meet the needs of the printing market for short-run printing. The digital printing technology has been used in the gravure printing industry. For more than 10 years, the job change time of the gravure printing machine is less than one hour, and it takes two or three hours seven years ago. The technical job replacement time is only 30 minutes.”
Richard Dunnington, Vice President of the American Gravure Association (GAA), said: "Gramming began as early as the 1970s with digital engraving technology. By the 90's, all parts of the engraving from the original to the drum were digitized. Technical work. The climax of the next digital technology application will be reflected in color management."
New ink technical quality and technical support are crucial for gravure printers. First-class technical support, rapid response time; ink quality should be superior, stable performance, reliable delivery time, competitive prices.
Innovation is also important; for gravure printing to enter the short-run printing market, ink manufacturers should continue to develop new products to help gravure printers meet the challenges of the future. At present, ink manufacturers such as Sun Chemical, Flint Ink, and Siegwerk are all developing new gravure printing inks to meet these needs. Mr. Wicher said: “Although many projects still belong to proprietary technologies, we can say that we have worked together to understand the interaction process of ink and ink paper from a more scientific point of view. This has further improved ink performance and improved quality. Working with customers to study the process of ink-paper interactions and develop inks with strong adhesion also benefited us both. This practice must be persevered and reflects the relentless pursuit of quality by Flint Ink."
Mr. Salesh Manny, Technical Director of Flint Ink, said: “Flint Ink cooperates with customers to jointly research and adopt new analytical methods. We also help customers to use other measurement data to effectively control printing parameters so that Accurately measure economic benefits and determine product quality. These measures will help reduce long-term problems and continue to increase the economic benefits of gravure printing."
Sun Chemical has successfully launched a water-based gravure ink for publication printing in Europe. This water-based gravure ink does not contain flammable solvents and is good for environmental protection. Roto Smeats Deventer, a Dutch printer, has used the above-mentioned water-based gravure printing inks in the production of advanced calendering papers.
Currently, Sun Chemical has developed several new types of water-based gravure inks and solvent-based inks in order to improve the surface quality of the flexible packaging and the quality of the coating. This kind of packaging printing uses a variety of substrates, the process is complex, each substrate has different requirements for the ink. For example, Sun Chemical has introduced an Ultra PET solvent-based coating ink, which has excellent printing adaptability and high adhesive strength, and is especially suitable for printing with a polyester surface treatment film in a gravure food packaging printing. use. According to Sun Chemical's professionals. UltraPET inks have low solvent content and are ideal inks for film packaging. In addition, due to the fast drying speed of this ink, it is also suitable for fast gravure printing.
Looking to the future, Siegwerk ink companies believe that the HotTech ink technology they are developing has great application potential. Mr. Fu Ke said: "Siegwerk is still developing the patented HotTech ink technology. This technology will be completed in a few years." HotTech ink is a solvent-free solid gravure printing ink in the printing process. Immediately melted on the roller. Mr. Longwell said: “We have conducted several successful tests on HotTech inks, but it takes a few years before we can bring them to market.”
Mr. Kailin said: “The water-based gravure printing technology is only suitable for packaging printers, but it still needs further development. At present, water-based gravure printing ink is more commonly used in paper printing. In the future, there will always be people in the packaging market development.”
The use of solvents is a concern, especially in Europe. So people have shown some interest in water-based gravure printing technology. European printers have used water-based gravure ink for a long time.
The future development of gravure ink industry professionals believe that gravure printing in 2002 still faces some difficulties. Mr. Todd said: “Some pressrooms are full of print job schedules, while others are not able to find any jobs. Recently, some retailers have claimed that they are in poor condition or have closed down, so the gravure printing in 2002 The number will surely be affected by some, and in addition, the postage increase in the second half of the year may also have some adverse effects on the gravure printing of direct mail items.
So how much room for development is there for gravure printing in 2002?
Mr. Fu Ke said: "Because the ordering situation is not good, many gravure printers are striving to recruit some short-run printing business to maintain the transaction amount and effectively arrange the production schedule. Although the increase in automation benefits this adjustment measure, it helps the overall It is still limited because the cost of gravure cylinders is still high compared with the cost of offset printing plates.In addition, due to the further increase in the number of single printing presses using thermosetting inks, the situation is not optimistic. Historically, web-based thermosetting offset printing has been the mainstay of gravure printing.The traditional advantages of gravure printing have always been reflected in the speed of printing, the web width, and the number of single cylinder impressions per million, color stability, low waste, and high printing quality. Most of the advantages are still maintained.Although the printing speed of web thermosetting offset printing has been greatly improved, the maximum width of thermosetting offset web is still less than half the width of the gravure printer. Significant progress has also been made in processing time and reducing front-end costs, which makes gravure printing on those printing Rely on automatic offset the short-run work equally competitive. "
For gravure printers and ink suppliers, in order to achieve steady development in the future, the most important thing is to develop short-run printing products and improve short-run printing capabilities.