Printing is a centuries old technology and it has made modern learning and to a very large extent it is the lynchpin on which the entire modern human civilization stands. With the change of times however, printing itself has evolved considerably and one such new tech is the use of flexo printing machine. These machines have made printing much more versatile. 

Working Principle of Flexo Printing Machines

At its very basic level, the flexo printing machine uses the basic principles of photolithography. Unlike letterpress which is impact printing, this is at best, contact printing. The process starts with the preparation of plates on which the printing material is laid down in the negative space.

Plates are made of thin metal sheets and are flexible which leads to the name, flexo printing. Plates can be prepared in custom or standard sizes, for example ISO paper sizes as well as standard announcement envelope sizes. Once a plate is ready, ink is applied to the plate.

After the application of ink, the plate is brought in contact with the surface on which printing is to be done. This can be anything from your regular paper to other things like plastic or fabric sheets. After this, an impression cylinder is rolled on the plate which transfers ink from plate to the print. After this, the final step is to do the drying and curing which fixes the ink to the print surface. If you need to do multicolor printing, the entire process is done from the beginning. 

Advantages of Flexo Printing for Envelope Production

While there are many printing technologies available, flexo printing tech has some advantages which makes it uniquely suitable for different print jobs, especially where different parameters like varied announcement envelope sizes have to be printed. 

• High Speed Printing: This is the first and one of the most important advantages that a flexo printing machine can have over almost all other printing methods. This speed advantage brings a number of derivative advantages as well including reduction in labor costs as well as lower cost of machine maintenance.

• Print on Many Things: Another very big advantage of flexo printing is the sheer level of versatility that this tech brings.Generally the understanding of printing is that it is limited to paper. However flexo printing can be done on a wide variety of substrates, not just paper, but also fiber, plastic and even clothes. 

• Print in Many Shapes and Designs: This is another big advantage of flexo printing especially over and above the more traditionally impact printing methods. You are not really limited to certain predefined shapes or characters but can print essentially anything. 

• Consistency in Quality: Since flexo printing is essentially an evolution of the basic principles of photolithography, you can be assured of one thing. The quality of the print job will be very high everytime, time after time. Since this is not an impact printing tech, the wear and tear of plates is microscopically small even after extremely high volume print runs. As opposed to this, impact printing technology cannot deliver high quality consistently because the printing blocks wear off after some time. 

• Cost Effectiveness: Finally, this is one advantage of flexo printing which can swing decisions on its own. The technology is very cost effective. One big factor is that once plates are made, they can be used for essentially an infinite number of print runs. An initial investment followed by a very low recurring cost will always be much more economical than a comparatively mid level cost which tends to recur time to time and thus keeps on climbing as the volume of work keeps on increasing and going into follow-up production runs.