Consumables
Continental Grafix offers solution for new printing technologies
Tuesday 08. January 2008 - A window film with polyester liner or laminated liner for printers with UV curing inks
Continental Grafix, the European manufacturer of high quality “one way vision” products, evidences once again its reactivity and presence in this market. Time and again, the users of self-adhesive window films have experienced the same problem when printing them with UV curing inks. The holes got clogged in most cases and the printed image has become useless. This is a problem for which Continental Grafix can already present a solution. For almost the whole product range, Continental Grafix offers an alternative with polyester liner.
Nearly all window films that can be found on the European market are provided with a paper liner on the reverse side. The depth of the hole, this means the place where the superfluous settles in, features in those cases exactly the thickness of the film. Usually this corresponds to 80 to 145 microns as the paper liner is directly applied underneath the self-adhesive film. This might be sufficient for solvent and eco-solvent inks but not for UV curing inks. With that technology, the surplus of ink must slide as deeply as possible into the hole before the UV curing process starts. If not – and several printers have already encountered this problem – the holes get “clogged” with this surplus of ink and the window film is only good to fill the dustbin.
Continental Grafix though already has figured out the solution for this problem. For the majority of qualities and perforations we can offer alternatives with polyester or laminated liner. Herewith this problem is solved. These both alternatives have the great advantage that there is an extra perforated backing material on the self-adhesive film before laminating it with a polyester liner or with a “hot melt paper”. The deepness of the hole gets bigger due to that additional process. Thereby the “depth” of the holes rises by 40 microns. As Continental Grafix window films show a thickness between 120 and 145 microns, it results with 160 to 185 microns holes where the ink can settle in before curing. No more bridging problem and no more clogged holes!
Even for solvent and eco solvent printers the new liners show advantages and an increasing number of users have been switching to our new technologies. As a matter of fact the ink settling deeper before drying prevents from irritation in the glue due to the outgassing of the solvents. That is the reason why printers, even when printing with solvent printers, are very interested in changing their usual window films for the “depth effect” window films of Continental Grafix
Most of our clients with UV curing inks printers have already changed to our new liner alternatives which have been especially conceived for these UV technologies. They do not have any more difficulties in printing window films.