Hybrid
Hybrid printing for products with exceptional performance and appearance
Many printed products on the market today have special features that require more than one printing technology to give them their intended look and functionality.
These features can be varnishes or lacquers providing gloss, matt or other special appearances to products, or functional applications like a cold seal or a COF (Coefficient of Friction) regulating varnish.
Hybrid for security, packaging, and label printing
Security products, such as cheques, lottery and entrance tickets, tax labels, and pharmaceutical, products, require often multiple safety features to prevent counterfeiting. These features can be provided by inks or varnishes that are water sensitive, solvents sensitive or that change colour when viewed under special lighting conditions like UV or IR, or in different thermal conditions. On top of this, there is also a growing tendency to apply visible and non-visible safety and security features on flexible packaging and labels.
Several of the mentioned special printing applications can be printed with web offset printing just by applying a modified ink containing special pigments, like for example a fluorescent pigment. Most others however, require different printing techniques such as dry offset, waterless offset, letterpress, flexo, rotogravure, intaglio, rotary screen, hot-foil, cold-foil, embossing and various digital printing techniques, to mention only a few.
Hybrid printing offers synergy of printing technologies
When different printing technologies are combined in one printing press it’s called a Hybrid press and products printed with a combination of printing technologies are so called hybrid printed. The final combination of printing technologies depends on the features and functions of the products to be printed with the press. The benefit of inline printing is that it eliminates separate process steps, and therefore eliminates additional waste, operator costs, waiting times and stock. Hybrid printing lines have higher productivity.
Custom Engineered solutions
At DG press we are highly knowledgeable and experienced in the integration of different printing technologies. DG press’ high-level drive and control technology assures that all existing printing technologies can be integrated into both our web offset press series.
DG press has globally a large installed base of hybrid web offset presses that are used for security printing with a combination of printing technologies. DG press hybrid presses are also utilised for printing flexible packaging and labels, combining web offset printing with flexo or gravure printing and various forms of digital printing.