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Liquid Photopolymer: A Seasoned Technology for Today's Corrugated Printing

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How often can you say a technology from the 1960s remains competitive in nearly the same form today? One technology is liquid photopolymer for direct print corrugated applications in flexography. Over the past 50+ years, we have witnessed the introduction of digital platemaking and the continued evolution of water wash technology for sheet photopolymers. Each of these areas competes with liquid platemaking yet, despite these competitive pressures, liquid technology remains alive and well. While liquid continues to evolve through imaging innovations and enhanced processing equipment, it maintains its fundamental characteristics as well as its ecological and economic strengths. Along with the digital revolution, and the equally demanding sustainable revolution returned focus to liquid's unique capabilities. Working for MacDermid Graphics Solutions, I have the unique vantage point of innovating in multiple plate technologies such as analog and digital platemaking, as well as solvent...
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Optimizing Solids

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Flexography is a printing process used for a large number of substrates and applications, as such the process colors can differ based on the pigments based on in their properties. Although there are color specifications, there is no general norm for density values leaving a number of open questions... What is the correct density for a printed job? Why do we find different values from company to company? Who is right? The reality is that in recent years a popular belief has emerged: the higher the density, the better the result. Ideally, an attainable, repeatable, and consistent standard should be established maintaining a correlation closest to the color proof. Image 1. Density values for different levels of reflectance.  Source: A Guide to Understanding Graphic  Arts Densitometry by X Right To optimize solids we must first review the basics...what is density, or to be more accurate, reflection density?  According to the Flexographic Image Reproduction Standards ...
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UV LED & PHOTOPOLYMER TECHNOLOGY

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Who's ready for some technical talk?! I hope you have your flexo dictionary handy... As photopolymer plate formulators, manufacturers and suppliers, we often get asked about emerging technologies and their impact on flexographic printing plate development. Sustainability, printed electronics, 3D Printing are just a few “buzzwords” we hear a lot about, BUT… UV LED technology may be the most “emerged” technology that we come across today. We’d like to take a few minutes to discuss how we, from the plate development and supply side of the fence, see this technology playing out and where we see ourselves standing in this growing field. UV LED Technology in Flexo Platemaking While the most common application of UV LED in flexographic printing today is often seen as the “on press” or print application area, the use of UV LED for curing flexographic plates has been around for longer than one may think. The use of UV LEDs has been most successfully applied via Esko in their “Inli...
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