To UV or Not to UV. . .

“UV inks can provide inherent durability, along with consistency in character definition and graphics,” says Hudson. “You can print cleaner in very, very fine copy, and product number one looks just like product number 1,000.”

UV: Flexo, offset, screen

UV inks are being used with all of the major printing processes—flexo, offset, screen, gravure, and letterpress. The reason is that, “a lot of the quality improvements [from UV] cut across all the printing technologies,” says John Kalkowski, marketing manager for Sun Chemical. “This includes UV’s ability to provide an improved dot structure with less dot gain, along with its superior chemical, water, and light [fading] resistance.”