In printing, LED UV curing is increasingly standard in new digital inkjet, flexographic and offset sheet-fed presses, and there’s a growing movement of printers retrofitting production lines that have existing UV curing systems to LED UV.
The majority of UV-curable inkjet printers on the market use LED-curing as their default curing technology as it has advanced to ensure faster curing and high-quality printing as well as improved production output.
LED UV curing has become predominant in wide-format graphics and label inkjet printing, since the advent of using a small carriage to rapidly move the lightweight lamp across the width of the printer to cure the inks. This could not be achieved with mercury arc lamps due to their heavier weight, large footprint and cooling mechanisms.
For flexographic presses, LED UV’s ability to cure with cooler temperatures is widely adopted as a game changer for printing on thinner films and a wider range of label stocks. Inkjet LED UV-curing leads the market in wide-format graphics primarily because of the ability to print on specialty substrates, and the majority of narrow web presses are sold standard with LED UV curing as well.
While the initial investment of LED systems can be as much as five times the cost of traditional arc UV curing systems, the total lifetime cost of ownership can be lower when calculating the lower operating cost and the longer service life of the LED curing lamps along with process and productivity gains.
LED UV-curing enables printers to produce and finish more documents on a single press, which can allow them to concentrate higher output volumes on fewer devices.
