About Flexographic Printing
Heavy duty printing jobs call for heavy duty printers and excellent techniques. One of the oldest of such techniques is known as flexography, or flexographic printing. It involves pressing raised lettering with ink onto whatever needs to be printed on. While it used to be an older, less-used method, recent advances are pushing flexographic into the forefront of modern printing technologies.
Identification
Spotting a flexographic printer is pretty easy, and they come in two main forms. They are either flat plates that can then be pressed onto a surface, or they are a cylinder that is rolled across a surface. What these both have in common are the raised letters or numbers that are on their surface. These hold a certain amount of ink and appear as the mirror version of whatever it is they are meant to print, with everything on the surface being backwards.
Expert Insight
Making a flexographic printing plate is fairly simple, though the use of complicated machinery may be needed. The most basic way of making one is to apply a film strip over a piece of polymer. ON the strip is writing according to what is to be printed. This is then exposed to ultraviolet light, which causes the lettering to be raised, while the rest of the polymer can be washed away. While this is the most basic technique, more complicated ways of creating the printing plates for flexography involve the use of laser etching onto metals.
Function
The raised lettering on the flexographic printing plates are coated with ink, and each one is specially designed to hold a certain amount of ink. From here, the flexographic printing process is simple. The printing plate is pressed onto the material that is being printed on if a flat plate is being used. This is good for printing on the side of boxes or if printing large banners. When the rolling plates are used, the same thing can be printed numerous times in one motion. This makes multiple printing simple and cost-effective.
History
Flexography began in 1890, when the first printer was made in England. It was then called an aniline printer because of the ink it used. These printing presses were made throughout England until the 1920's, when Germany began to produce the majority of them. These printing presses were used mainly for food packaging, until the FDA banned the inks they used, finding them unsuitable for food packaging. This caused the sales of flexographic printing presses to plummet in the 1940s. Since then, the process has been labeled antique, until the last decade has seen advances in the presses and pushed them into a position more prominent than even lithography printers.
Benefits
The biggest benefit that is offered by flexography is its ability to work with a number of different types of inks. Other printing processes only function using specific ink types, which limits what they can do. Now that flexography has become more technically capable and advanced, this flexibility in ink use has made it one of the more popular printing processes, and many companies are in the process of switching over to it.
