Marketing messaging today can be overwhelming, especially with flexo photopolymer plates  and the word “clean.” You hear terms like clean print, clean plate, prints clean, anti-fill, and more. It is safe to say all plate manufacturers want you to achieve cleaner print, and there are only so many ways to say it or even show it. You may have even seen our competitors using a stock photo we too have used to advertise our plates and technology (awkward). While we won’t mention our competitors by name, we all know improving plate cleanliness on press is a big benefit for flexo printing, but what does the “clean” really mean? Clean - The MacDermid Plate Definition First, if cleanliness on press must be improved, that means something must be dirty, right? “Dirty” print is a multi-factored issue and can be impacted by more than just the plate. Our friends at All Printing Resources (APR) did a great job explaining dirty print in their three-part blog post “Understanding Common...

Bryce Benson’s introduction to EPIC plate technology In May 2017, during my first year with MacDermid Graphics Solutions, I visited Miller Graphics in Sunne, Sweden.   While waiting for my meeting, I ran into Jan Viberg, then with Esko, and now the Managing Director of Marvaco Sweden.   Never one to shy away from good conversation, Viberg asked quite frankly, “When’s MacDermid going to bring back the EPIC plate? That was a great plate.”  As I replied to many questions in that first year, I simply said, “I don’t know, but I can find out.” First, I had to learn a bit about the EPIC plate, so I called our headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. EPIC’s journey began in the early nineties. Flexible film printing struggled to attain a balance of low dot gain with good solid ink density and coverage --- capped plate technology was the solution. For the people who think “baseball cap” when you hear “cap”, the cap we are referring to here is a micro-rough layer on a photopol...