Waterless UV Printing − Discussed at Tenth MAN Roland PraxisDialog

Waterless printing with UV – a niche process that keeps attracting new users at two-figure growth rates.

It has established itself in printing on non-absorbent surfaces and is winning ever more new friends in advertising printing: waterless UV printing simply lets the press operator “get into color faster“. At the PraxisDialog, Detlef Braun, Chairman of the “European Waterless Printing Association” (EWPA), gave a vivid and easy-to-understand talk on applications, advantages and challenges of the printing process. With the growth in number of users, waterless UV printing seems to become more interesting in terms of efficiency, too. marks-3zet, the market-leading manufacturer of plates for waterless offset, certainly reports a strong increase in the consumption of its plates over the past five years. The prices of the formerly expensive plates are dropping, the move into waterless UV printing is becoming more attractive for a broader target group.

Demanding print jobs

In the MAN Roland Graphic Center, the high performance capacity of waterless UV printing was demonstrated on a six-color ROLAND 500 with coating. The very first printing forme was a toughie: a check card on 0.3 mm monofilm with high black content and extremely small reverse type. Postpress finishing work on site turned the press sheets into laminated check card as end of the product. The difficult jobs that were demonstrated convinced the eye by their printing quality, which served to underpin the attractiveness of the printing process. In a concluding discussion, Detlef Braun, marks-3zet, the ink manufacturer Zeller + Gmelin and Stephan Engel from the Graphic Center answered questions on a wide variety of pertinent subjects. The next PraxisDialog on September 20 will deal with “Halftone Technologies”. Registration at praxisdialog@man-roland.de