Printing Innovation Asia Issue 3 2021
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Key points to success digital printing for pac As print providers and food manufacturers strive to ensure the safety of food labels and packaging, demand is growing for capabilities and compliance of inkjet solutions that won’t negatively impact food or human health. Memjet’s water-based pigment inks offer high-quality output, durability on a wide range of substrates, and safer ingredients than alternative technologies and are making inroads into label printing, and are emerging in flexible packaging, folding cartons, and corrugated packaging as well. Clean-up and maintenance with waterbased cleaning agents also reduces workplace hazards and air permitting costs. New Revenue Streams: Savvy printers are building new revenue models leveraging increased performance, reduced waste and regulatory costs, and the capability to create short run products to capture new customers and markets. Flexibility: Hybrid printing solutions give label printers much greater flexibility. They can still use their flexo presses to produce longer run jobs, while the hybrid option extends their capabilities to include customized labels and packaging, higher graphic content, smaller lot sizes, and the faster cycle times client’s demand. Hybrid printing has the added benefit of supporting a sustainable circular economy, by
extending the life of existing equipment while ramping up the use of more environmentally friendly technology.
“watch” the job run real time or put the requirement of reliability on the printhead technology.
Print Quality: Print quality can vary amongst inkjet print solutions. In general, a high resolution printhead with a small drop size will provide the best image quality (fine details and smooth transitions). Powered by Memjet print solutions with 2.1 pL drop size and true print resolution of 1600 dpi, provides unrivalled inkjet print quality along with the durability needed to satisfy the most demanding markets.
Memjet’s DuraLink printhead design uniquely address this issue with builtin nozzle redundancy for each vertical line of print. What this means in terms of reliability is that we can have many nozzles contributing to each image line blocked with minimal change in print quality or optical density. This allows our customers to print every packaging job element with confidence until the next maintenance cycle is applied to the printhead returning it to 100% functionality for the next image line. The fact that our industry leading resolution is so fine means that single missing droplets have significantly less impact. Other systems with lower resolution and therefore large droplets will mean a large white space when the printhead nozzle does not fire, and as every print provider knows, there are always nozzle outs.
1. What are the pitfalls to watch out for? Reliability is a key requirement for any print solution. Automated packaging and job processing systems that run at high-speed with high print quality specifications mean each print job element is critical. You cannot afford to find out that your roll of printed media has job elements missing when you get to the next step. So, you either have expensive and complex integrated vision systems to
Watch out for claims about “low migration” inks. Food Contact Materials (FCM) compliance is a function of ink ingredient selection and
