If you’re familiar with screen printing, you’ll know it is one of the most attractive embellishments for labels.
With effects that require larger ink lay down, such as metallic colours, strong opaques, tactile warning symbols, special varnishes and scratch-off inks, screen printing brings many advantages to label printing - especially in durability and vivid colour reproduction.
MPS offers the most versatility in the use of screen printing as a complementary process to your press. Here are a few available solutions:
Screen printing above a flexo station
A screen unit added to a flexo station gives printers a very flexible solution for their printing jobs.
For example, its ergonomic working height. The screen unit is easy to use because it’s at the same height as your operator’s hands. Besides, it’s easy to move the unit from one machine to another, making it very versatile.
Screen on rail
Screen on a rail system can be used in between all colours, in flexo as well as offset. The additional UV 
lamp on screen is also a benefit, as the unit acts as a separate colour this way. If you don’t use a UV lamp, you’ll need to dry the screen ink in the flexo unit below (meaning you can’t use colour from this flexo unit). The advantage of using the UV lamp on screen is that you can still use the flexo colour beneath for additional coverage.
For drying tactile varnishes, we recommend NUVA2 (GEW), which is an extra powerful UV lamp specially designed for thick layers of tactile varnishes. This lamp can be installed on a separate chill drum and the distance between the screen and the lamp can vary for better ink flow.
Dedicated screen unit
MPS also offers a dedicated screen unit specially developed with Stork, that is completely integrated into the press. The advantage here is that because the screen unit is connected with the press, your operator can control it from the central panel, and it supports iControl. It also provides a 2-sided gear driven screen for stable printing on RotaMesh as well as RotaPlate.
The stability of the register on an MPS press with screen printing is perfect, even in the first or second run. Even on a complicated machine like this one described below, recently installed with a customer.
The above is a 15-colour flexo press, consisting of:
- 8 colours flexo
- Screen printing unit on rail with a UV lamp added
- Flatbed hot foil unit (Pantec RHINO™)
- Additional 4 flexo units with another screen unit on the rail with UV lamp
Interested in learning more about screen printing with MPS presses? Contact us, here.