Of all the inks available for large format digital printing: Solvent, Eco-Solvent, and Latex none have the opacity that the UV ink delivers.
Why digital printing opacity is awesome
What is opacity? Opacity is the lack of transparency or translucence. For signs and graphic printing, opacity means the potential of the ink to cover the color of the substrate. To illustrate this better if you have a yellow substrate and you apply a red ink to it the color of you print will look green, since ink is not opaque enough to completely cover the yellow of the substrate thus you’ll end up having a graphic resulting in the mix of red + yellow.
In the print world at large “color” is defined as the sum of 2 basic elements: the color of the media and + the color of the ink itself… This is why every time you use a substrate you must “profile” it to have a predictable color. Solvent, eco-solvent and Latex (acuose) inks penetrate the substrate and blend hues with it, UV ink not much. UV ink penetrates very little into the substrate, in fact, the chemical reactions involve in the drying-curing process of the UV ink are about converting the liquid ink in a solid polymer so most of the UV ink remains on top of the substrate surface creating an extra layer thus increasing opacity. As a matter of fact, most of the composition of the liquid UV ink is pigments and a cocktail of photoinitiators, but most pigments..
UV ink once cured is basically a polymer… You can actually feel the UV curable ink.
If you want to print over Red piece of plastic, Not a problem! UV ink offers you the greatest opacity available to ensure excellent color reproduction. However print modes and file composition are sometimes necessary to make adjustments for color accuracy. A very common cure for opacity issues is applying a white mask underneath the print. A white mask is a white layer of ink between the substrate and the ink.
At Hello Printing, we tap on UV curing technology for most of our flatbeds prints. We also run jobs in our UV printers when the customer application demands an extreme opacity or when we desire a dot gain close to zero for extremely detailed prints.
Hello Printing Ideas we have an array of solutions for virtually any print need! Ingenuity, Work and Service
Happy Printing!