Important quality indicators of printed materials

An important quality indicator of printed materials is the service life, which is more prominent in durable materials such as PS plates, rubber blankets and rubber rollers. Material procurement costs and service life are inversely proportional to the period of time. The use of good quality printed materials not only improves the efficiency of use and the quality of printed matter, but also more importantly extends the service life and reduces the loss of work stoppages. The service life has a significant impact on the cost of materials. Compared with a PS plate that can print 60,000 copies and can print 120,000 copies, the difference is intuitive and easy to calculate, and it also has the advantage of improving the quality of printed matter. A qualified material buyer or manager must consider the life of the material together with the price.

Experience tells us that the service life and sales price of materials do not all increase by 1:1, and most of them are that the price growth rate is lower than the life extension rate. Only when the quality is increased to a certain degree, there will be a separate price increase, and no longer involve the growth of service life. At this time, there must be a principle that if the price growth is slower than the growth of the service life, then better quality materials should be used. However, most purchasers and even decision makers do not have a good grasp of the useful life of materials. They are often neither printers nor technicians, and often prefer to accept the suppliers' opinions rather than listen to the views of front-line workers. Of course, there is still a problem of insufficient data management. Some companies have recorded and summarized the data of their useful life, but they have not formed a data system with reference value.
It is necessary here to discuss the technical relationship between material life and sales price. The main factors affecting the service life of printed materials are aging and damage, and these two aspects are closely related to the selection of raw materials and the production and processing of materials. The raw materials are selected well, the processing technology is good, the corresponding printing process characteristics will be good, and the service life will be prolonged accordingly. From the perspective of the price structure of raw materials, whether it is chemical raw materials or metal raw materials, the price of entering the factory is often basically determined, and the price change caused by the production process becomes the main factor of the price change of raw materials with quality. Taking the PS plate as an example, the aluminum plates, sensitizers, etc. used are mostly based on weight, and there are great differences in the reprocessing process after the raw materials enter the factory. This becomes the main factor that causes the price change of the final product. Therefore, the service life of the product does not increase at the same pace as the cost.

The price of a product is sometimes related to its choice of main ingredients. Low-priced products must be low-cost, and the best way to reduce costs is to reduce the amount of raw materials used, which often directly affects the service life. Taking the PS version of the press as an example, the printing press is designed to have a thickness of 0.30 mm, with a minimum of 0.28 mm. Some domestic PS plates have a nominal thickness of 0.28mm, and the downward tolerance is very large; while the imported PS plates are all nominal thicknesses of 0.30mm, the downward tolerance is very small. The requirement that the thickness of the low-price PS plate is lower than the tolerance will lead to insufficient pressure during printing. The solution is to increase the amount of blanket packing, resulting in inconsistence of the linear speed of the plate cylinder and the blanket cylinder, and making the plate wear faster. . Although aluminum materials are saved and sales prices are reduced, the resistance to India is much lower, and individual cases can even be about twice as poor.

As more and more social capital is involved in the production of printed materials, the quality of printed materials has been largely disintegrated, and the length of service life has also become prominent. Therefore, when purchasing materials, it is necessary to pay attention to the relationship between service life and price, and to obtain the lowest material cost. Material procurement, of course, must also be combined with production needs, and it is impossible to pursue the service life blindly. For example, a product with a small amount of printing does not have practical significance for the printing plate's resistance to high printing force; a printing product with a large amount of printing must consider the change in the material cost caused by the printing plate's resistance to printing force.

Source: Wirt Machinery (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.