The success of your vape products depends significantly on the vape cartridge packaging, which is why the brands have started paying attention to packaging standards. When it comes down to vape packaging, printing is an essential factor, along with the finishing, color, and shape, to make sure the product and its packaging look unique.
The bad thing is that it can be challenging to choose one printing technique that aligns with your brand and product’s value. For this reason, we are sharing the top printing techniques for vape packaging, along with its pros and cons.
Digital Printing
Digital printing is a suitable choice for vape packaging as well as stationery packaging, books, and textiles. Back in 1992, the first digital printer was launched, while HP Indigo was released in 1993, which played an essential role in the boom of digital printing. Digital printing depends on the transfer of computer-based data between the printer and the computer.
Instead of traditional printing techniques that use particular accessories which need to change every time you’ve to print something, the digital printing process tends to work in a constant flow. In simpler words, digital printers operate continuously without any extra preparation. Also, it has exceptional print quality, and you will be able to modify the data while printing.
Digital packaging is a promising choice for printing multiple pages and series of books without changing the settings. When it comes down to digital printing, we are sharing two primary techniques used in digital printing, including digital inkjet printing and graphic printing.
Digital Inkjet Printing
As the name suggests, an inkjet is sprayed on the paper with the help of an electromagnetic charge. It’s evident that purchasing a printer is affordable, but the cartridges have a low life as compared to laser printers – this leads to a high price. For this reason, digital inkjet printing cannot be used for printing large-size boxes.
Graphic Printing
Graphic printing depends on toner or powdered ink that’s sprayed with the help of static electricity. It promises high-end printing quality and efficiency, even if there is a high purchase cost. In addition, it needs more maintenance but is suitable for printing graphics and texts without compromising the finesse of the details.
Some of the pros of digital printing include ease of use, flexible design, exceptional resolution, fast charge, and affordable for small-scale businesses. In addition, it minimizes the chances of paper wastage to ensure consistent flow. Not to forget, it minimizes chemical waste (it’s better to use cardboard casing to ensure zero to minimal impact).
On the other hand, you need to be considerate about the slow printing slow, high costs of printing inks, and limited capacity of deinking.
Offset Printing
Offset printing is a promising choice for catalogs, posters, books, ads, and obviously, vape packaging. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that offset printing is one of the most used printing methods and depends on the water-repelling process. With this process, a pattern or document is reproduced to make sure it’s applied to the metal plate.
Consequently, the plate is passed against the cylinder that’s covered with a blanket or rubber to ensure seamless transfer of ink. The number of plates depends on the number of colors your printing has. With Vape Cartridge Boxes, four colors are used, including black, yellow, cyan, and magenta. The inks are transferred multiple times to create the layers of ink for a concentrated yet accurate color.
However, you must remember that offset printing doesn’t allow modification. Some of the pros include high-end resolution, better production speeds, reasonable aptitude to deink, and suitability for different papers, irrespective of the grammage. On the other hand, you need to be careful about the variable cost (cost changes with the number of plates and inks), slow drying process, and that the inks are solvent-based.
Flexographic Printing
Flexographic printing is a promising choice for vape packaging as well as corrugated cardboard, paper, polyethylene film, labels, and boxboard. This is a unique printing technique that depends on flexible printing form, which is known as cliché. In this process, the picture is connected to the support with the help of a photopolymer plate or cylinder.
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the accuracy and quality of print depend on the cliché and its finesse. It is not a suitable choice for large-scale businesses, but it can adapt to different types of color and media needs. This printing technique is extremely flexible and allows the diverse utilization of inks. Flexographic printing is a great choice since the production speed is high with low costs.
In fact, flexographic printing helps with inline shaping but curating the semitones is challenging. In addition, the preparation of plates takes a long time, and the drying process will be slow as well.
Screen Printing
Screen printing is widely used for printing aluminum, plastic, electronic parts, textiles, and glass jars. In addition, you can use it for vape packaging – it leverages a metal fiber canvas and/or polyester fabric to create the screen printing frame. The ink is applied to this frame with the help of a squeegee – the ink is applied in layers, color by color.
Screen printing promises durable and reliable outcomes – the good thing is that it can be used on different materials and formats. It can be used for small as well as large formats, and you can experiment with as many colors as you want. Screen printing also leads to high-quality color rendering. The only issue is finesse because the colors aren’t always accurate.
Rotogravure Printing
This printing technique has been around since the 1820s and includes the utilization of liquid inks and cylinder cells before they are connected to the support for printing a specific pattern. The cells have a specific depth to optimize the color rendering. It’s a recommended option for large prints because it can take a few hours to dry. For this reason, it’s a promising choice to achieve rich and intense color combinations.
On a concluding note, Vape Cartridge Packaging is pretty easy to curate, but it’s important to leverage the correct printing technique to yield the best results!
