Personalized printing market
With the large-scale application of SKU barcodes in the packaging of food, beverage, industrial, electronic, and pharmaceutical products, the market needs a variable data package printing system to manage data changes such as languages, components, barcodes, and SKU codes.
Other information such as the results of sports events printed on product packaging has been widely used by consumer goods companies. Research shows that personalized and localized packaging can significantly increase the sales of products. Any product packaging that requires a large amount of variable data to be printed, but with less print is a potential application area for inkjet printing.
At the same time, inkjet printing as a non-contact printing technology, especially suitable for packaging printing, because it needs to deal with a variety of substrates and product forms, unlike the toner-based printing technology, such as HP Indigo and Xerox Docucolor, need Direct contact with the surface of the substrate, ink-jet printing using tiny liquid ink particles, through the air jet onto the substrate, and thus showing a non-rich level and tone. Printing on bottles or cans is almost impossible for laser digital printers.
The UV-curable ink shows its unique advantages, such as better fixation and reliability. UV inks can be fixed on a wide range of substrates, such as coated or uncoated paper, film, gold foil, metal, plastic film, glass, wood, etc., and are very suitable for label and packaging printing. The different surface characteristics of the substrate can affect the image quality and can be adequately adjusted by adjusting the ink composition. At the same time, UV inks are very reliable. Unlike volatile solvent inks, they do not dry on the print head and are more conducive to equipment maintenance. They are very suitable for packaging printing that requires high equipment utilization.
UV inks can also meet customer's unique needs by changing the formula, such as spot color inks, meet recyclable, health, safety requirements, or security inks with anti-counterfeiting effects. In recent years, although there are still some costs and technical problems, due to its advantages in printing speed and environmental protection, many ink companies have started to cooperate in the research and development of new UV ink jet printing inks.
Commercial sheetfed offset market
With inkjet printing successfully entering the large-format traditional printing field, people began to look for their next breakthrough. The commercial sheetfed offset printing market is undoubtedly an attractive goal. However, the higher printing speed and quality of the sheet-fed offset printing press are still inferior to those of inkjet printing. Therefore, people urgently need new technologies to solve this bottleneck. However, inkjet printing still has the opportunity to find a suitable place in commercial printing. For example, as an assistive technology, printing personalized data or processing some short-lived jobs, it can also expand a new market for printers.
Jetrion believes that combining a traditional sheetfed offset press with digital printing technology as a composite printing method is undoubtedly an effective combination and is attractive to many printing companies. Like the narrow roll label printing industry, commercial offset printing is also a combination of the two to achieve the benefits of both fish and bears. This kind of hybrid printing technology that has been highly anticipated by Jetrion will hopefully increase the digitization of printing companies and be used to print various variable data such as barcodes, serial numbers, and variable images. The technical conditions determine that most of the variable data is only printed in monochrome, which complements offset printing. This technology enables printing companies to obtain low-cost, high-speed printing while gaining the ability to increase market demand.
At present, the fixed-matrix system is still in the experimental stage, and a lot of work must be done before large-scale application to reduce costs and increase speed.
Fujifilm Sericol's latest Inca platform-based UV ink jet printer has breakthrough speed and print quality, and the price advantage in short-run printing will impact the offset printing market. Commercial printing companies will consider integrating inkjet printing into existing businesses to meet the needs of more personalized, less-printed customers.
The advantages of inkjet, such as personalization and short-run printing, will continue to attract people's attention to digital printing technology, especially new devices that can provide higher speed and quality. Ink manufacturers are also constantly developing new technologies to help the rapid growth in this area.