What Are Printing Plates for Corrugated Boxes

 Corrugated boxes are a kind of common paper packaging products that are inseparable from our lives and production. The printing quality of corrugated paper boxes is not only related to the appearance quality of corrugated paper boxes, but also affects the sales prospects of the packaged products and the image of the commodity production enterprises. Therefore, it is particularly important to analyze how to improve the surface printing effect of corrugated paper boxes, how to choose the appropriate printing process, and further reduce the processing cost of paper boxes.

1. Flexographic printing

Flexographic printing is printing directly on corrugated cardboard, using water-based ink, so some people also call this process watermarking. Flexographic direct printing has the following characteristics:

(1) Large format. The maximum width of a wide-format flexographic printing machine can reach 2.5m~2.8m.

(2) Low price. Flexographic printing has high print durability and can be reused; the price of ink is also low.

The strength of the carton is reduced less. Since flexographic printing is a light pressure printing, it has little effect on the strength of the corrugated board.

(3) The printing precision is not high. The conventional offset printing screen number is 175 lines/inch, while the conventional screen number of flexographic carton is 35 lines/inch~65 lines/inch. It is a low-precision printing method and is most suitable for printing text line drafts.

(4) The printing quality is not stable, which is mainly reflected in the difficulty in controlling the depth of the printing ink.

2. Offset printing

It is a kind of indirect printing method, that is, the cardboard face paper is printed first, and then the printed face paper is pasted on the corrugated cardboard.

Since the resolution of the printing plates for corrugated boxes is relatively high, very fine printed patterns can be printed. At present, most of the high-end corrugated cardboard boxes used for sales packaging in my country are offset printed products. Offset printing has the following features:

(1) The printed product is very fine, and the screen count can reach 150 lines/inch~200 lines/inch.

(2) The aluminium lithographic offset printing plates are used for printing,making the whole plate making process easy.

(3) Surface finishing can be performed, such as lamination, glazing, etc.

(4) The printing cost is high.

(5) The printing quality is relatively stable.

3. Screen printing

It adopts direct printing. Since the ink-down rate of the screen plate is proportional to the hole pitch of the screen, the resolution of screen printing is not high, the image precision is low, and the conventional screen number is 60 lines/inch to 80 lines/inch. It has the following features:

(1) Low production efficiency.

(2) The printing format can be large or small.

(3)The ink color of screen printing is thick, so its color saturation is high and the visual effect is strong, especially the effect of monochrome printing is better.

(4) It is suitable for printing non-fine products.

(5) Plate making is easy and the plate making cost is low.

(6) Printing cost is low.

(7) Printing quality is relatively stable.

Haomei Aluminum supplies CTP and positive PS plate for various printing application. Welcome to inquire offset printing plate cost from us.

Original source: https://www.alumhm.com/a/what-are-printing-plates-for-corrugated-boxes.html