With the departure of April, the special report of digital printing on high-speed ink-jet printing will come to an end. Today we will share with you the last article in the special report on high-speed inkjet printing.
At present, UV ink is still the main consumables in the ink-jet printing market, but the water-based ink in the market is also growing. Now let's take a brief look at the inkjet printing market and think about the future of UV and water-based ink technology.
In the field of label and packaging, the competition of color digital printing technology mainly lies between electrostatic imaging and ink-jet technology. Of course, in the field of electrostatic imaging digital printing, there is often a contrast between HP's electronic ink and the toner technology of other brands, the latter mainly comes from Konica Minolta and Secon. In the ink-jet field, more than 90% of production ink-jet printers used for labels and packaging use UV ink. However, we have seen many signals indicating that water-based ink is growing, which is due to the research and development considerations of technology providers and market choices.
Why can UV ink dominate today's market?
UV ink has already occupied a leading position in the packaging digital printing market. This is because UV ink has high stability and will not become dry when exposed to the air. Therefore, even if you use the print head intermittently, you do not have to worry about the ink jet head drying and blocking. In addition, the UV LED curing lamp has a compact structure and excellent drying effect. It can almost cure the printed image immediately. The cured image has high durability, making UV inkjet suitable for both industrial printing and high fidelity image printing. For high fidelity printing, UV inkjet also has two useful additional functions, namely, it can print smooth surfaces and can print on textured surfaces (such as decorations).
But in terms of packaging, UV ink does have a fatal weakness. The uncured toxic substances in UV ink may migrate out of the packaging. Food and beverage packaging is the core of FMCG market. Ink manufacturers meet this challenge by preparing "low migration" UV inks, which are cured more thoroughly than ordinary UV inks and are sufficient to meet key standards for packaging materials (e.g., Swiss Weapons, Nestle Guidelines). These low mobility inks contribute to the development of UV ink in the market, but they have not completely eliminated the concerns of food brands about this technology, although these concerns may now prevail over rationality.
Water based ink is the main substitute for UV ink, which usually has no toxicity problem. This advantage makes water based ink popular. This growth started with label rotary printing, but now it is turning to digital printing packaging (such as cartons and small bags). However, the disadvantage of water-based ink is that its drying process is solidified by evaporation or heat. In low-speed, small batch printing presses, this is not a big problem, because curing depends on air drying. However, for high-speed printing presses, the drying of water-based ink has become a great challenge, usually requiring high-power thermal dryers.