The development status and development trend of printing technology in China

With the continuous development of social economy, vigorously developing economy-saving industries and realizing the transformation of economic structure have become the new tasks of current economic development, and the five development concepts of innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing established by the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Party provide development ideas for the development of the packaging industry. At the same time, the implementation of printing based on the "Internet +" action has transformed from the past rough development model into a personalized and high-quality direction. However, compared with developed countries, the total output value of China's printing industry is still very low. Based on the new requirements of the society for the printing industry, it is required that printing technology should continue to carry out technological innovation in order to meet the needs of social development.

1 Overview of printing

Printing (Graphic Arts, Graphic Communications) is a technology that transfers ink to paper, textiles, leather, and other materials through the process of plate making, ink application, and pressure to reproduce the contents of the original text. In a simple sense, printing is the process of using a plate or other means to transfer the graphic information on the original manuscript to the substrate, and it can also be understood as the replication process of using an analog or digital image carrier to transfer the color agent/color material (such as ink) to the substrate.

Printing technology in China has a long history, it represents the excellent culture of the Chinese nation, is the crystallization of human wisdom, the earliest existing documents and the earliest Chinese block printing material is in 600 AD, that is, the early Tang Dynasty. With the development of economy, the application of printing technology in production practice is more extensive, it can be said that all walks of life are inseparable from printing, overall printing technology mainly includes: lithography printing, letterpress printing (including flexographic process), gravure printing, screen printing and digital printing coexist. Generally speaking, offset printing process in China's printing history for a long time, and because of its low production cost, and widely used in practice, but it has the disadvantage of high energy consumption, is not conducive to China's current efforts to develop energy-saving resources of the economic development requirements. Flexible printing has the advantages of many printing processes, flexible printing has the characteristics of small printing pressure and clear impression at the time of printing, especially the universality of printing objects, which can not only adapt to high-quality cardboard, but also adapt to poor quality cardboard, but its plate material is more expensive, so the manufacturing cost is relatively high, especially not suitable for small batch production; Gravure printing process has a strong sense of printing layer, so the printing ink is easy to dry in the printing process, so gravure printing process is suitable for home decoration products, such as suitable for field printing and so on, based on the printing technology is not easy to produce printing color difference, so it is suitable for large-scale printing products; Screen printing process as the name suggests its plate is a screen structure, through the role of the scraper to make the liquid ink through the mesh of the network layout version, permeate and pad printing on the product, thus forming the printed text and text, its biggest feature is the thick printing ink layer, suitable for printing a large area of the field or line layout products, but, The accuracy of its product reproduction is not as good as that of offset, gravure or flexo printing processes. Gravure printing is a printing process with the highest printing resistance of the plate, and its printing speed is also fast, and the precision of product reproduction is relatively high. Digital printing is the product of the development of computer technology, is the main development trend of current printing technology, digital printing can meet the needs of personalized printing business, mainly through the computer printing products directly printed to a variety of materials, the application of digital printing technology for traditional printing technology is a breakthrough, changed the backward process of traditional printing. It has met the requirements for the implementation of the "Internet +" action. In particular, the development of cloud technology has driven the development of "cloud" printing technology, and it can be said that a large number of personalized printing needs have promoted the application of cloud printing technology. Compared with traditional printing methods, cloud printing can achieve personalized customization, order at any time, fast delivery, due to the use of network technology to optimize the production process, reduce production costs, can effectively save paper costs for customers.