The Label Printing Blog

Flexographic printing is capable of achieving high quality printed images at high production speeds, making it a popular choice in the food packaging, textiles and label printing industries, especially for longer print runs.

Flexographic (Flexo) printing has much in common with other forms of rotary printing, but with added versatility due to the ability to hybridise Flexo presses with new digital technologies to boost productivity and reduce costs.

Today’s manufacturing and converting processes have become complex, calling for automation and increased production. The use of computer controls and state-of-the art technology is becoming more evident. In the meantime, the cost of energy, industry’s biggest necessity, has become more expensive, especially for heating and drying. Industry has, therefore demanded that equipment manufacturers provide better and more efficient heating systems.

The Flexographic (flexo) printing press is one of the most efficient and consistent printing tools that we have in the market today, for all medium & long run print applications.

Flexo continues to be the most popular of all web-fed technologies that has been deployed throughout the printing industry. A flexo press uses flexible photopolymer printing plates to imprint images across a wide range of surfaces, making it one of the most efficient methods for large volume requirements.

Flexographic printing plates are flexible photopolymer plates, used in flexo printing to transfer ink & images to a flexible substrate, such as paper or film. The printing plates are a critical element of the flexographic printing process and the quality of the printed image is largely dependant on the quality of the flexo plates used.

It may come as no surprise in our opinion it is best to buy a new Flexo printing machine.  As such will operate for a long time without undergoing a major breakdown as opposed to buying second-hand. But how much do Flexo printing machines cost? High or low? It really does not matter. The right question to ask would be how much value you will derive from the machine, what is my return on investment.

Flexography is a reliable technology through its continuous development over several decades and beats many other techniques for volume production. Here is more information about it.

When used for medium to long print runs, the advantages of flexography outweigh the disadvantages by far, thus making it the best printing technology for long-term return on investment. Things are less clear when considering Flexo for short run production.

A Personal Invitation to visit Focus Label Machinery & our Manufacturing, Production & Showroom facilities: March 20th & 21st Focus Label Machinery Ltd Bingham Nottingham.

10am – 4pm on the 20th & 21st March 2018

Although both methods use wet ink and printing plates, these two printing processes are quite different. Technically, offset printing can refer to any printing technique that uses a printing plate to transfer an image to an intermediate carrier and then onto the printed substrate. Whereas flexo transfers ink from the plate directly to the substrate.

The Below Case Study is taken from the CLC (UK) Ltd New Press Installation article which can be found here - http://www.clc-uk.com/2016/10/14/new-press-installatiom/