Brand Owners, Flexo Printers, & Platemakers
Brand owners drive print quality for package printing to higher and higher levels. Most often brand owners can select from a range of printing processes including, but not limited to, flexo. By utilizing MacDermid’s award-winning technology to improve flexo print capabilities, brand owners have greater flexibility selecting the print method which best suits their needs. Meanwhile, flexo printers are challenged to expand the capabilities of flexo printing to compete more effectively with offset, gravure, and digital printing methods. In the past, flexo was perceived to deliver a lower print quality and a less consistent print that the other print methods. MacDermid’s technology improves the print quality & consistency of wide web film, broadening the sweet spot in printers operating windows and providing an opportunity to expand their businesses. Platemakers now have an option to significantly improve flexo print quality and print consistency using MacDermid’s award-winning LUX platemaking process.
Technology
MacDermid offers some unique technology providing one-of-a-kind benefits to its customers. This includes digital capped plates which can be dual processed, either in solvent or using a LAVA thermal processor. Additionally, MacDermid possesses the only technology which can produce flat-top dots using a thermal plate processor. This provides MacDermid customers who currently have a thermal processor an easy path to producing a flat-top dot using the LUX plate process in combination with their LAVA processor.
Dot Shape: Round Top or Flat-Top
Dot shape has a profound effect on print performance. When the flexo printing industry transitioned from analog platemaking to digital, there were many improvements. However, there were also some sacrifices, most of which were related to the shape of the digital dot. LUX technology from MacDermid allows our customers to produce flat-top digital dots. This technology can be used with all of MacDermid’s digital products, in all gauges and format sizes. It can uniquely be used in either solvent or thermal processors. LUX is the only way to produce a flat-top dot with a thermal process. This LUX process produces dots with both a different shape of both the top of the dot, and the dot profile. This change in dot shape allows printers to significantly raise the quality and consistency of flexo printing. Highlight dots produced from the LUX process have lower mechanical dot gain than conventional digital dots.
Processing: Solvent or Thermal
MacDermid is the only company to offer a full line of products which can be processed either in solvent or thermally using MacDermid’s LAVA process. This provides increased flexibility for shifting plate production capacity around an operation, without having to change the plate. The choice of plate processing method is no longer tied to the printing plate. Independently, YOU CHOOSE which plate and plate processing method is best for your business.
LUX Award-Winning Technology
In 2011, MacDermid received the FTA’s Technical Innovation Award and the FPPA’s Technology Innovator Award. Using LUX technologies has many advantages in terms of print quality, but it also offers the printer and package buyer both financial and environmental advantages.
