At present, there are two modes for international printing: the American model and the European-Asia model. A country that values ​​fashion culture tends to pursue high-end and specialty packaging, and therefore prefers gravure printing, such as Japan and South Korea. Obviously, China is closer to the European-Asia model.
Approaching does not mean that the east wind is overwhelming the westerly winds, or that the west wind overwhelms the east winds, nor is it that you sing me out. As a phenomenon, existence has its significance.
The ultimate in spiritual practice is "nothing". What is the highest state of printing? Stealing that it is "natural." Just like the strong food in the biological chain, it is not necessary to control whoever replaces it and eliminates who. Existence is a natural state; survival, it must be a natural choice.
I would like to use this article as a period of competition between flexo and gravure in the industry.
In recent years, flexo printing has achieved unprecedented development in China, but there have also been some problems that cannot be ignored: On the one hand, many flexographic printing equipment introduced domestically have not achieved the desired results (including product quality, productivity, and economic efficiency). But on the other hand, some people are proposing that flexo printing is or will replace gravure. In order to achieve a sustained, healthy and rapid development of our country's flexographic printing, we must solve several important issues of flexo and gravure from understanding and practice.
1. Gravure and flexo are not new printing processes.
Although flexo printing was really valued and rapidly developed in China in recent years, it is not a new process technology. It has experienced many years of development like gravure printing, only in recent years. More mature.
2. The main application areas of gravure printing and flexo printing are, in particular, the orientation of key products and they are all the same. They maintain their advantages in different application areas.
In the fields of packaging and trademark printing, publishing and printing, decorative printing (grain paper and transfer printing) and other special printing (such as banknotes, stamps, lottery and other securities), the advantages of gravure printing and flexo printing are different.
Packaging and trademark printing are major areas of competition for gravure and flexo. The main application products of the flexo are corrugated cardboard, labels, flexible packaging and folding cartons. The printing of corrugated cardboard is printed in more than 85-98% of foreign countries using flexographic printing. The difference between Europe and the United States is not large. It is the smallest difference among all packaging products. In this area is mainly the competition between flexo and offset printing. This area should be one of the most potential areas of application for the development of flexographic printing in China; label printing is a large-scale industry in many developed countries, and the use of flexographic printing is 85-90%. In recent years, label printing in China, especially adhesive labels, has developed rapidly, but the overall scale is still small. Flexographic printing in this industry should have more room for development. Flexible packaging is the industry that has the most disputes in terms of flexo and intaglio in the world and has the greatest development differences. In this area, the United States uses a flexo version of about 70-80%, Europe, 35-40%, and Asia (including Japan and South Korea, etc.) this ratio is between 5-8%, while China's ratio is even lower. The biggest difficulty in the promotion of flexographic technology in our country is estimated in the field of flexible packaging; the proportion of flexographic printing in cartons is not the same in all countries: 30-40% in the United States and 10% in Europe. It can be seen that in the above-mentioned four types of packaging, the carton uses the lowest flexographic printing ratio. In fact, in the field of folding cartons, there are many kinds of printing methods such as glue, soft, and gravure. However, the narrow-width unit flexo presses introduced by our country are mainly aimed at this field. No wonder the actual results are not ideal.
Gravure printing and flexo printing in publishing and printing are mainly used in the printing of newspapers and periodicals. In newspaper printing, the proportion of flexographic applications is between 20-38% in the United States and Europe. The gravure is mainly used for the printing of newspaper supplements. The gravure is an important printing method for high-end, high-volume publications and samples in the United States and Europe. They are actually competing with offset respectively.
Woodgrain printing is a very fast growing industry in the world in recent years. Gravure printing is used in all fields and water-based inks are basically used. Transfer printing is also basically a gravure printing market; all products requiring high security performance are required. (In particular, securities) In recent years, more and more domestic and international use of combination printing, but the main technology is still gravure.
3. The gravure and flexo printing equipments have different structural features, and there are also big differences in the supply of raw and auxiliary materials.
First, the gravure printing machine adopts the unit structure at home and abroad; however, the flexographic printing machine is different. The vast majority of foreign flexographic printing presses are of satellite structure, and the unit type and stacking type only occupy a small proportion. In China, basically, unit type flexo presses (both domestic and imported) are used, and only a handful of imported equipment are available for satellites. The advantages of flexographic printing are, to a considerable extent, associated with satellite flexo presses. The main advantage of the satellite structure is: Because the material tightly wrapped on the center of the impression cylinder, so the tension is very stable, you can not use the automatic control system; the structure is simple; the distance between the imprinting points is short, easy to register QC. Therefore, the satellite type is the best and main structure of a flexo press. Therefore, it can be said that the days when China’s flexo printing machines were mainly based on satellites were the time for the full development of flexo printing.
Second, polychromism is an important development trend, especially in the packaging field. This is a favorable factor for the development of the group printing press. At present, satellite-type flexo presses generally have 4-8 colors, and only a few manufacturers in the world can produce 10-color machines. (To be continued)