Will product label printing Ever Die?

[Hession Alysa]

By tradition, label and sticker printing has been prepared on big, mechanical printing presses. This has constantly been a complex and costly process, relating your artwork to do films in order to generate flexography printing plates - which are then loaded on to the printing press, the inks are mixed and the machine is standardized. All this actions must take place before printing a single label or sticker. Digital printing has brought drastic changes in all this things - it carries custom label and sticker printing into the 21st century.

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There are four main advantages of digital label printing to be followed as:

1. Speed - With no plates to generate, and very little arrangement of the machine, a custom label job in printing on a digital printing press can be printed within minutes not hours. Many other printing presses can take several hours to set up for a four color process job, while the digital printing press is ready to go almost instantaneously. By the digital printing process, we can have 4 or 5 custom label jobs away the door whereas the old style printing press is still being set up.

2. Quality - If you want elevated resolution and exciting colors then you require digital printing. Digital printer can print at 230 line screens, while most flexography printers print at 133 or 150 line screens only. The customers can actually see the difference in the custom label's detail and color. Suppose, if you are selling your products at the retail level, you should think that digital label printing is best when it comes to the quality of the label.

3. Cost - Since there are no plates to produce, no film to yield and minimal machine setup, fixed prices for the digital printer are very low in association with other printing shops. Hence if you want to print a reasonably small number of custom labels (say less than 25,000), you will constantly get a better cost with digital printing. This manner you can order only the products you want, rather than a vast number of custom labels just to get the best unit price - which apparently affects your cash flow in a positive way.

"Gang running" - is an important technique that refers to the capability to join several different designs into a single printing press job. In flexography printing, this is impossible - as each custom label design needs separate plates and setup and consequently each product carries considerable cost outlays. In digital printing, it is possible to "gang" together multiple labels and designs (so long as they're the same size) into a single job. For example, 10 designs of a 3" x 4" custom labels and need 250 stickers of each design, it would treat as a single 2500-label job and cost it accordingly.

4. Flexibility - Perhaps digital printing's supreme power is its flexibility. With digital printing, print 1,000 custom labels and every label can contain different data. It is completely variable data printing. Whether you wish to include names from a database, multiple barcodes, consecutive numbers, or just several editions of the same label, digital printing can hold it with ease .

There are CD label makers which are also good for printing labels for other purpose too. Some of them were connected to the computer and the designs are made in computer and the commands are given to print the appropriate designs. Also some of them have keyboard and screen built in it which does not require any computer to connect with it. CD label maker are different from the normal computer printers. It has special mechanism to handle the rolled adhesive paper on which CD labels are printed.

Common connectivity for CD label maker is RS-232 serial port, Universal Serial Bus, parallel port, Ethernet or any sort of wireless media. To make any labels the CD label maker requires range of materials for the development like adhesive paper, synthetic polymer (plastic) materials. There are various types of mechanism used like thermal, impact and laser but thermal mechanism are most commonly used. Two types of thermal which are direct thermal and thermal transfer type.

The direct thermal type uses heat sensitive paper which is similar to thermal fax paper. When using this technology, it tends to fade within 6 to 12 months time more over if exposed to heat,direct sunlight or chemical contact is made the life of the art on the CD label shortens. Therefore direct thermal technique is used when the requirement for the label is for the short period of time.

The second form of mechanism is thermal transfer uses heat to transfer ink from the ribbon on to the label for a permanent print. There are three forms of ribbons used in thermal transfer technique which are wax, wax/resin and only resin. Wax works great with smudge resistance and it's good for matte and semi glossy paper labels. Wax and resin are good for smudge resistance, semi glossy paper and some synthetic forms too. Resin is scratch and chemical resistance and it good for coated synthetic CD labels

When a CD label maker is continuously working there are situation when the print might shift from the actual location and this may vary from label to label. To ensure perfect area where the print has to take place from the media high quality label maker have a sensor for this which detects the fault of gap, Line, notch perforation between labels. This allows the label maker to adjust the input of label stocks so that the printing is done properly over the labels without any error.

There are label maker applicators which automate the processing of label making. These systems are used commonly in industrial and warehousing area where requirement of label printing is done is mass. The software which runs on normal computers is built to create designs and formats for labels. This software supports the general operating system and the drivers of the machine.

There are label makers which print the label and same time encode them with a RFID (Radio Frequency Identification).It is like a barcode which is made so that humans are unable to read or encode the information Check out here hidden in it.