Discover the advantages and disadvantages of high-quality UV printing. Learn how this innovative technology can benefit your business, from vibrant colors and quick drying times to potential limitations in material compatibility. Stay informed and make the best choice for your printing needs.

What is UV printing?

UV printing is an advanced digital printing. It uses X-rays to solidify the ink and print directly on the material.
 
The advantages of UV printing can be summarized as fast printing speed, high printing quality, wide range of UV printing materials, environmental protection of UV printing, and better color vividness of printed products.

1. Where is the fast UV printing speed reflected?
UV printers mainly use ultraviolet rays to cure ink and achieve fast printing. It can be said that it is dry as soon as it is printed, and the ink stains and offset phenomena are too greatly reduced.
 
2. High printing quality
UV printing can make UV ink dry quickly. It avoids problems such as dirty ink and offset of printed patterns to a certain extent. In addition, UV curing ink is also waterproof, high temperature resistant, and scratch resistant. It is also because of this that UV printing is more suitable for outdoor advertising.
3. UV printing materials are wide
It can be printed on materials such as wood, glass, crystal, PVC, acrylic, plastic, stone, and leather.
4. Because of the environmental protection of UV ink, its eco-friendly protection properties are better.
5. The printed products are durable
6. UV printing has higher color vividness.

Why are printed products durable?  This involves a UV professional knowledge-UV coating.

What is UV coating?

UV coating is a hard transparent coating applied to printed materials. It is applied in liquid form and then exposed to ultraviolet light, which will immediately bond and dry it. Its biggest feature is that it can prevent scratches, tears, and fingerprints, enhance the brightness of the printed pattern, and make the printed pattern last for a long time, Therefore, this is one of the important reasons why most advertising printing users choose UV printers.

Disadvantages of UV printing

In general, although UV printing can be applied to all materials, including cylindrical transparent glass, such as large glass in shopping malls, three-dimensional metal, etc., it is not perfect and has certain limitations. If there are too many slanting surfaces on the material, the UV printer cannot print on it. In addition, the price of UV ink (which has the characteristics of high resolution and instant drying) is twice that of ordinary ink.

What preparations need to be made before UV printing?

1. The working environment is the most important. We must ensure that the UV printer is in a place without direct sunlight and humidity so that the printer can work normally.
 2. The ink and the media to be printed must be sufficient. If all of them are inadequate, it will affect the normal operation of the printing machine and the factory time of the printed products.
 3. We must ensure the power cables and cords are properly connected.
 
After understanding what preparations need to be made before UV printing, let's take a look at how it is printed.

How does UV printing work?

1. Set the printing parameters on the UV printer control panel
The printing parameters of the UV printer include print quality, print speed, ink type, print resolution, etc. We need to set the printing parameters according to the actual printing task.
 2. Select the image and pattern to be printed on the computer
After we set the printing parameters, the next step is to select the image or pattern to be printed. When we select the image, we need to pay attention to the resolution and size of the image.
 3. After the above operations are completed, we start UV printing
It must be noted that during the printing process, we must always observe the working status of the UV printer to see if there will be paper jams, whether the printed pattern is unclear, etc. If there are any abnormalities, they must be solved in time.

What needs to be done after UV printing:

When our UV printer is finished printing, we need to clean the UV printer, mainly paying attention to the following points: avoid ink residue on the printing platform or in the ink tank, and keep the core parts of the machine such as the print nozzle and the guide rail clean. The print nozzle can be cleaned with a special cleaning fluid, and the guide rail can be wiped clean.
If you want to save stickers, we can properly store the remaining printed stickers for subsequent use.
 
Finally, remember to turn off the power of the UV printer, which saves electricity and protects the service life of the printer.

Conclusion

In short, although UV printing has advantages and disadvantages, its continuous technological advancement may make it cheaper and more widely used in various industries (home decoration, advertising, personalized design, etc.).