What Flexographic Printing Is 

For those who are in the printing industry, or are looking to make packaging related to this, you may’ve heard of the word “flexography” in some instances, without knowing much about the world in general. This is something that’s known as modern-day letterpress, and it can print a lot on diffenrt substrates, such as but not including the following: 

  • Paper
  • Plastic 
  • Films 
  • Metals 
  • Cellophane 

These are effective in costs, and they offer a ton of options, which is why many people use it. 

This is one that also won’t destroy the budgets of others. 

The Process 

There are different processes, which include: 

  • The preparation of the images 
  • Making plates 
  • Mounting this 
  • Printing it 
  • Finishing it 

Basically, you choose a material, or a substrate, and then, you put it in a location. A roll then goes through a varying amount of different rotary relief plates, and then, it feeds the plate to some ink, and then it can be put directly onto the substrate 

The colors do require you to have multiple plates since they do work in an interchangeable manner to offer the colors needed for a product. 

This is used as well with finishes too and offers a lot of specialized finishes that work. 

These include: 

  • Foil stamping 
  • Die-cutting 
  • Embossing and embossing 
  • UV coating 

These are then integrated all throughout the job to get everything done in just one pass. 

The flexographic inks usually have lowered levels of viscosity, and because of this, they usually are there on the substrates directly until they become solid. 

This may seem petty simple at first glance, but it’s pretty complex due to the amount of different printing options. 

There are different options that you can get to. 

Traditional flexo is one that utilizes doctor blades in order to get rid of the ink in excess, and then spread these solvents directly onto the planets, offering an even color that spreads through this. 

There is also refined flexo, which utilizes different cylinders in order to offer a crisper, better image quality, and it’s the one that’s a bit more cost-effective. 

The Advantages 

Here are some of the advantages of using flexographic printing: 

  • It offers a chance for you to print the images that youwnat to on different plastics, papers, acetate, and even corrugated materials. It also works well on cellophane and plastics, and all of which offer the same level of quality that’s there. 
  • It also uses different inks that can be UV curable, water-based, or even solvents, all of which offer sustainable, fast drying times, and also saves a ton of time.
  • The process is very flexible, so it can definitely print a bunch of different impressions, and there are a lot of different lengths that are there, in order to offer the proper specifications for the customer at hand. 
  • It’s also a lot cheaper compared to the other methods, as this offers faster drying inks. 

The disadvantages 

There are a few disadvantages of using flexo printing, worth mentioning too. 

  • They are a bit generic.  It can’t do anything super meticulous, so if you need something like that, go for offset. 
  • It can cost a bit initially, since you do need different plates, and there also may be extra costs for wrapping and distorting the images 
  • There are a lot of chances to use this, but for a lot of companies that are small or do sampling, his is something that isn’t viable, as the setup is quite high for this.