Advantages of Disc Printing Technology and Process Control (I)

The application of more common optical disc printing methods is screen printing and offset printing, and printing is a relatively new situation. As a special printing process, the areas where printing technology is good at are always closely related to screen printing. Wherever screen printing can be applied, printing is often followed by the attitude of a friend.

CD-ROM is the most modern way of recording information in modern society. It can not only record the original graphic information recorded by the book, but also record multimedia information such as sound and video. But the information recorded on the optical disc is not visible as if it were opened as a book. It must be read and written by means of a laser. That is to say, it records some “intangible things” that must be restored to “as is” using modern technology to be Identified. To give such things to an ancient scholarly bachelor to study, it can only see a bright disc. This analogy also proves the importance of printing. The history of mankind has been creating a variety of black boxes, and printing allows us to associate it with its mystery. When we printed a brief description of this disc, the bachelor would understand what was recorded on some discs. Of course, curiosity will force him to smash this disc to search for things inside.

When it comes to printing on a disc, the printing process is definitely more than just a piece of fun. In fact, the wonderful performance of the printing process on the optical disc has been recognized by more and more people in the industry. The use of offset printing methods is undoubtedly the most successful. It achieves the highest resolution and fastest printing speed. However, its speed is too fast. If the number of optical discs is not large, offset printing cannot be considered an ideal choice. The cost of an offset press is not something anyone can afford. Therefore, screen printing often replaces offset printing. The advantages of screen printing speak a lot, but there is one drawback but it is very deadly. When the screen is pressed onto the disc, the pressure fluctuates from one end to the other when the squeegee is squeegeed. Since the discs are all sheets with a thickness of 1.5 mm or less, they are light and there will always be slight grazing, which affects the printing quality. It is a common thing. Many CD-ROM printing centers purchase a few screen printers to open a CD-ROM, which is a good thing, but it is not easy to guarantee the quality of printing. Since the optical disc is transferred from one machine to another machine during multi-color overprinting, the optical disc itself does not have a circumferential positioning mark, and it is difficult to achieve accurate overprinting.

Advantages of Optical Disk Printing Technology

CD printing is a battleground for the military. It is logical for pad printing experts to pay attention to this market. Pad printing pressure comes from soft and elastic pad printing heads. It is pressed vertically from the top of the disc and will not affect the position of the disc at all. Since the center of the disc is a center hole with a diameter of 15 mm, it is just possible to eliminate the problem that the center of the rubber head is prone to voids. Multi-color pad printers are much simpler to print than multi-color screen printers, and it is of course much more accurate to accept multiple overprints of the disc at the same location.

Pad printing has always had the advantage that screen printing cannot, and one of them is that it is very good at printing small-area products. Although optical discs are mainly based on large-diameter discs with a diameter of 120 mm, the market share of 80-mm compact discs is increasing, and various special-shaped discs and business card discs have emerged. These have raised new issues for the adaptability of the printing process. The open process table mechanism of the printing process makes it convenient to place various kinds of fixtures, and it is also very simple to make special special plastic heads. In particular, the replacement of printing plates is faster, and pad printing quickly gains the favor of CD printing. It is not a word of mouth.

Need color management?

Although CDs carry greater value, their color requirements are far less stringent than paper publications. The main reason is that the printing machine manufacturers lack understanding of the leading edge technology of printing—color management. No company can use the color management technology of other printing processes as the method of pad printing color control, so pad printing has been stuck in the past. Large deviations in the color quality space. The entire process of film production lacks effective color management methods. Its greatest risk lies in the control of the overlay of printing discs on the optical discs. Many companies have received complaints that are not equipment problems. They mainly focus on the difficulty in achieving the customer's color with stability. Template requirements. Due to the lack of professional technical personnel to propose effective methods of improving color management, color management has always been a problem that manufacturers are trying to avoid. They would rather accept the inherent gaps in printing and would not be frankly pointing out solutions. In today's mainstream printing industry, the quality requirements of customers are unconditionally pushed forward to the limit. The key to why printing is difficult to compete with them is that the color management of pad printing is not only not valued, but has not even been mentioned by most manufacturers.

In any case, the printing companies must begin to pay attention to color management. This is the only way for CD printing to become the favorite. Maybe we can't be as strict as offset, but at least we can start building this framework today and then gradually improve it. We need to realize the dataization of the basic parameters of the film production process. We should start using density meters. We should understand the color characteristics of our computers, scanners, printers, and laser imagesetters. Only in this way can the printing technology advance step by step.

(to be continued)