In the mid-to-late 1990s, with the successful development of laser engraving technology, corrugated carton packaging printing plates gradually applied laser engraving technology.
Corrugated box packaging is divided into two categories, one is sales packaging, and the other is transportation packaging. Sales packaging generally belongs to the inner packaging, which will meet consumers during the sales process, such as toothpaste, soap, and cigarettes. And transport packaging generally belongs to the outer packaging, such as the outer packaging of a full box of toothpaste, soap, and cigarettes that will not meet with consumers during the sales process. Its main function is to facilitate storage and transportation. These printing requirements are about 60 lines, transportation packaging is generally around 40 lines, and the sales packaging above 80 lines belongs to color offset printing.
The laser engraving machine is an optical, mechanical, and electrical integration product with high technical content, and has efficient, fast, accurate, and clear automatic engraving functions. Packaging and engraving with laser power can achieve energy-saving and environmental protection processing. The laser automatic engraving plate-making can achieve the printing effect of 40-60 lines, and the manual plate-making is below 40 lines. Then laser engraving plate making completely replaced hand engraving plate making. Due to the low cost of laser engraving plate making, it takes only a quarter of the cost of the resin plate. At present, the carton industry generally adopts laser engraving plate making and resin plate, which is the printing plate for corrugated box packaging.
Comparison between laser engraving plate making and manual engraving plate making
Laser engraving plate-making is completely superior to manual plate-making design. After laser engraving plate-making was introduced to the market, within ten years, the engraving achieved a slope of 0.3mm through software upgrades, and the light attenuation at the engraving corners is automatically compensated. That improves the automatic engraving speed eliminating the manual engraving plate making.
In addition, laser engraving plate making can eliminate errors during engraving. The original manual engraving inevitably causes engraving errors, and original manuscript errors, and a single mistake in manual engraving will make the entire layout scrapped. And laser engraving uses software to input the original manuscript into automatic engraving, no engraving errors will occur.
Comparison of laser engraving plate making and resin plate making
A set of equipment for a 2-meter photosensitive flexible drying machine is no less than six hundred thousand, while the approximate cost of a laser engraving machine is only about sixty thousand.
Taking the Pearl River Delta region of China as an example, the average price of the resin plate is 1.25 /in2, and the laser engraving plate is 0.32 /in2. Although mass production of the resin plate can reduce the production cost to 0.90/in2, but, not any company can do it. Even if it can be done, the cost is still much higher than that of laser plate making.
Laser engraving plate-making has low energy consumption and no pollution. Resin plate processing is highly polluting. Although the plate-making liquid recovery device is used, certain pollution will inevitably be generated.
The size of laser engraving can be infinitely large, and the production site only needs more than ten square meters, while the working site of the resin plate printing machine cannot be less than 40 square meters, the smell is pungent during production, and the production site must be separated separately. Besides, the processing size is limited by the machine model. And the 2-meter photosensitive flexible printing machine can only produce resin plates within 2 meters.
Competition and Forecast of Laser Engraving Plate and Photosensitive Resin Plate
After laser engraving plate-making was introduced to the market, the price of photosensitive resin plates dropped sharply, it is falling to $0.19 /in2 today, and the production scale shrank accordingly. The benefits of plate-making competition to the carton packaging industry are obvious.
To sum up, in the future, corrugated box packaging companies will continue to compete in printing plate technology, and the competition between laser engraving plate making and photosensitive resin plates will continue and become more intense. According to the forecast of corrugated packaging carton industry experts: in the future, the photosensitive resin will be completely withdrawn from the printing plate of transport packaging cartons. For product printing between transportation and sales packaging, photosensitive resin plates still have the upper hand, about 60% use photosensitive resin plates, and 40% Plate making using laser engraving.
At present, the printing plates of the corrugated box packaging industry generally occupy 75% of the market share by laser engraving, and there is a tendency to continue to extend. Although photosensitive resin has high stability and high-definition printing effects, the cost problem restricts its development and bottleneck, and even if the cost can be reduced, the environmental protection issue is the most critical issue restricting its development.
Economical and environmentally friendly laser engraving plate making is expected to be an important development direction for printing plates in the carton packaging industry in the future.
