Doubt in Spot Color print registration

pruthvi

Member
Hi all,

I am very new to this forum and new to flexo printing too. I have a problem in my printing that I am willing to solve. We manufacture garment adhesive labels in our office and use both offset and flexo machines to do so. Being garment labels, our production involves using a lot of spot colors (you can say around 90%). We were traditionally using offset to print adhesives and have recently changed to flexo. Using flexo, the vibrancy is much better and the overall finish is good, but one slight problem still persists. I have attached a pic below clearly showing the difference. One is a photo of our job done is flexo and the other is in offset. In the case of flexo the colors are very vibrant but the problem is the junction where the colors meet. A dark line is formed when these colors meet and it is impossible to remove it. In the case of offset, it is very minute or absent. I would like to know if this is a nature of flexo because I have read elsewhere that offset produces very sharp images, or is it a problem in our design and registration. Any help would be great.

Thanks,
Pruthvi.
 

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It is either the registration (easy to check) or the trappping width is set too wide in your workflow.
 
Sheetfed offset delivers a very high degree of registration accuracy so much less bleed/trap is required. We use around 3-4 thou for our sheetfed and around 7 thou for our web Flexo. I would solve any mechanical/electrical registration issues you may have with the flexo web press and then you will be able to reduce the bleed you need. However I dont believe you will never be down to sheetfed specs. Good luck
 
So took sometime and corrected our workflow, was able to achieve much better results, still not as great as the ones we achieve in our offset press. The main overlapping of ink in between the 2 colors has vanished, but the result still is not ultra precise as our offset printed one. Is this because of the range of anilox we are using? Offset generally gives us a much higher resolution, but can the same be achieved in flexo for solids? We are currently using 500-800 lpi for our flexo to print solids, and this does create many problems such as dotted prints, mottling, and hazy registration etc.
 

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