Preface As we navigate these times during the COVID-19 pandemic, MacDermid Graphics Solutions is proud of our global team for following local health safety guidelines while continuing to support our company and customers. Ivan Rozo, Business Development Manager, MGS Latin America, wrote this blog to reflect on the changes and challenges that we are all experiencing in the packaging supply chain. With this article, Ivan wants to thank our LATAM team; he and the rest of MacDermid stand behind them as they work to stay on top of the current situation.   Image 1. Planning and Solutions To start, we must travel back in time to the fall of 2019...businesses were budgeting and organizing sales plans for 2020. Having a string of continuous growth, it seemed logical to project a new year with bigger goals and more significant challenges. For MacDermid, the differentiation in our value equation always seeks to provide operational advantages that allow us to solve busin...

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...

Let’s face it printing on corrugated media has been plagued by fluting problems from the very beginning. What is fluting you ask? Fluting is an area of print having higher gain along the tops of the flutes versus in the valleys between them. This print density differential gives the appearance of the printed piece of corduroy striping running along the flutes of the board. For those visual learners (we love visual learners!), the photo below shows heavy fluting on the left and minimal fluting on the right. The Change to Digital For years, analog printing plates performed acceptably with minimal fluting; however, in the early 2000’s the print industry’s workflow started changing…enter DIGITAL PREPRESS . This workflow lead to an increase in the use of digital flexo printing plates. Unfortunately, digital printing plates tend to flute worse than their analog counterparts due to the geometry of the rounded printing plate dot and the edges of type and solids. This...

Flexographic (aka Flexo) printing quality rivals the quality of both offset and gravure. Is this the first time you heard this? Probably not! If you are reading this blog you are likely aware flexo is the #1 print method for flexible packaging in both the United States and Europe. The evolution of flexo from a somewhat viable option to the #1 choice is multifaceted with advancements across the entire printing process. One major factor is that flexo printers are optimizing their processes with flat-top dot photopolymer printing plate solutions. It’s been said, to do a job correctly, first you must have the right tools. In today’s flexo printing market, having the right plate (the tool) can make the job easier, more consistent, and ultimately more profitable. Flat-Top Dots The packaging market consists of four major market segments: flexible, tag & label, folding carton, and corrugated. MacDermid Graphics Solutions (MGS) has an out of the box, flat-top dot solution for all markets...