Technical characteristics and development prospects of digital printing and screen printing
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In recent years, digital printing has developed rapidly and has great potential to replace screen printing. What are the differences between these two printing processes, and how to understand and choose? The following is a detailed analysis and interpretation of the technical characteristics and development prospects of digital printing and screen printing.
Printing refers to the use of dyes or paints to form graphics and text on the surface of fabrics. With the development of printing technology, a pattern has been formed in which various printing processes such as screen printing, rotary screen printing, roller printing, and digital printing coexist with each other. Various printing processes have different application ranges, process characteristics, and printing equipment and consumables used. As a traditional classic printing process, screen printing has a wide range of applications and accounts for a relatively high proportion in the printing industry. In recent years, digital printing has developed rapidly, and many people believe that there will be a trend to replace screen printing. What are the differences between these two printing processes? Here is an analysis of the differences between digital printing and screen printing.
The types of printing materials are not much different
Digital printing is divided into five categories: acid digital printing, reactive digital printing, paint digital printing, dispersed thermal transfer printing and dispersed direct injection digital printing. Digital printing acid ink is suitable for fabrics such as wool, silk and other protein fibers and nylon fibers. Digital printing reactive dye ink is mainly suitable for digital printing of cotton, linen, viscose fiber, silk and other fabrics, and can be used for digital printing of cotton fabrics, silk fabrics, wool fabrics and other natural fiber fabrics. Digital printing paint ink is suitable for digital inkjet paint printing of cotton fabrics, silk fabrics, chemical fiber and blended chemical fiber fabrics, knitted fabrics, sweaters, towels, and blankets. Digital printing thermal transfer ink is suitable for transfer printing on polyester, non-woven fabrics, ceramics and other materials. Digital printing direct-injection dispersed ink is suitable for digital printing of polyester fabrics, such as decorative fabrics, flag fabrics, banners, etc.
Traditional screen printing does not have much advantage over digital printing in terms of the types of printing materials. First, there are limitations in the size of the printing format of traditional printing. The effective width of large-scale industrial digital inkjet printers can reach 3 to 4 meters, and they can print continuously with no limit on length. They can even form an entire production line; second, On some materials, traditional water-based ink printing cannot achieve better performance. For this reason, solvent-based ink can only be used for printing. Digital printing can use water-based ink for inkjet printing on any material, thus avoiding a large number of uses. Flammable and explosive non-environmentally friendly solvent.
Digital printing has more vivid colors
The biggest advantage of digital printing is mainly concentrated in the fineness of color and pattern. First of all, in terms of color, digital printing inks are divided into dye-based inks and pigment-based inks. Dyes have bright colors and are better than pigments. Acid digital printing, reactive digital printing, dispersed thermal transfer printing and dispersed direct injection digital printing all use dye-based inks. Although paint digital printing uses pigments as colorants, they all use nano-scale pigment pastes. As long as a specific ink is matched with a dedicated ICC curve, the color display can be achieved to the extreme. The colors of traditional screen printing are firstly based on four-color dot contrasting, and secondly, they are controlled by pre-press ink color matching. The color expression is not as good as digital printing. In addition, in digital printing, pigment inks use nano-scale pigment pastes. The dyes in dye inks are water-soluble. Even in dispersed sublimation transfer inks, the colorants are also nano-scale.
The fineness of digital printing patterns is related to the characteristics of the inkjet print head and the printing speed. The smaller the ink droplets of the inkjet print head, the higher the printing accuracy. Among them, the Epson micro-piezoelectric print head has the smallest ink droplets. Although the ink droplets of the industrial head are larger than it, it can also print images with a precision of 1440dpi. In addition, for the same printer, the faster the printing speed, the smaller the printing accuracy. Screen printing requires negative plate making first. Errors in the plate making process and the mesh size of the screen have an impact on the fineness of the pattern. Theoretically, the smaller the screen aperture, the better, but generally, 100~150 mesh screens are used for printing, and the mesh number of four-color dots is 200 mesh. The higher the mesh number, the greater the chance of water-based ink blocking the screen. This is a common problem. In addition, the accuracy of the plate during scraping printing has a great influence on the fineness of the printed pattern. Machine printing is relatively better, but manual printing is more difficult to control.
Obviously, color and fine graphics are not the advantages of screen printing. Its advantage lies in special printing pastes, such as gold, silver, bead color, crack effect, bronzing flocking effect, suede foaming effect, etc. In addition, screen printing can print 3D stationary effects, which are difficult to achieve with current digital printing. In addition, it is difficult to produce white ink for digital printing. Currently, white ink mainly relies on imported ink, but printing on dark fabrics cannot be done without white. This is the difficulty that needs to be overcome to popularize digital printing in China.
High maintenance cost is its disadvantage. It is difficult to improve the washing fastness and rubbing fastness of digital printing products; it is difficult to develop stable white ink, resulting in the inability to print better on black and dark fabrics; due to the constraints of inkjet print heads, it is difficult to develop stable white ink. Printing ink with special effects; printing sometimes requires pre- and post-processing, which is more complicated than traditional printing. These are the disadvantages of current digital printing.
If traditional screen printing wants to make steady progress in today’s printing industry, it must grasp the following points: improve the environmental protection of printing inks, control environmental pollution in printing production; improve existing special printing effect printing, and develop new Special printing effects lead the printing trend; keep up with the 3D craze and develop a variety of 3D printing effects; while maintaining the washability and friction dyeing fastness properties of printed products, develop imitating digital feel-free, light and thin printing effects in conventional printing; To develop wide-width printing solutions and continuously improve printing efficiency and production capacity, it is best to develop a printing assembly line platform; simplify printing equipment, reduce consumable investment, improve printing input-output ratio, and enhance the competitive advantage of digital printing.
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