Week No.36, 2010

Screen-Offset: What a lovely marriage of convenience!

We have had a long week end in India with one festival holiday followed by a Sunday (today) hence my posting for the last week end was spilled over to this week… but never say too late.

For the last six months I have been moving around the country to meet enterprising printing professionals who have embraced screen printing gracefully.

The Lovely Offset in Sivakasi, efex colour  screens in Chennai, Gautam Paper Udyog in Surat, National Printing Press, King of Kings Printers and Pinnacle Prints, Perfect Packaging in Mumbai, Saraswati Printing Press and Rakesh Press in New Delhi, Print Pack (India) in Noida, Jaipur Printers in Jaipur, Suvidha Graphics in Aurangabad, Nirmal Offset in Nashik … all of them have one thing in common. These are the printing houses providing offset printing service/packaging printing solutions to their customers for the last several years….but now all of them have embraced screen printing by deploying screen printing machines from Grafica to offer value addition.

During my interaction with them they admitted that with screen printing process, they see ways to generate new ideas and explore their creativity. They see business potential in Screen Printing which is the perfect complement to offset printing for offering value addition.

Embracing screen printing means … either outsourcing screen printing service for spot UV and print finishing or setting up inhouse screen printing unit. I know two major customers of Grafica who have Grafica’s Cylinder press and other semi automatic screen printing machines which are mainly used to to undertake job work for big offset printers in and around Mumbai (Ace Printers in Mumbai and Star Labels in Navi Mumbai). These printers high class spot UV and specialty screen printing services and I had seen their presses are fully occupied almost all the days of the year except on holidays. You would imagine how much offset printed jobs are being treated/coated with special effects.

My friend in the screen printing industry, Mr. Mustafa Kapdia also tells me the growing demand for special effect inks, that means demand is growing for value addition.

To my surprise, recently the leading packaging magazine: Modern Packaging & Design, published to Infomedia 18/Network 18 Group has carried an article on advanced screen  printing, authored by Mr. Bhargav Mistry, MD of Grafica. On their own their editorial had approached him to write this and more articles in future. They  had also published a round table article on offset/screen combination in which the offset printing solution providers have agreed that it is all upto print solution provider to which printing process to use for a particular job but surely screen printing has an upper hand in terms of costly effectively adding to offset printed jobs and packaging.

Recently, PrintWeek India has also dedicated 8 pages for FESPA/SPAI to give comprehensive coverage on wide format and screen  printing. They  also publish BEST OF BHARGAV, a column on special effect printing demonstrated at DMI.

All these developments clearly point out that there is no infighting between the two or more printing processes. As our screen printing guru Michel Caza has been repeatedly telling me in his email messages that screen printing is a printing process which can play an important complementary role to offset and or digital.. Recently my one year old friend Shabbir Kachwalla, label printing expert and proprietor of Modern Enterprises shared with me that there is also a possibility of incorporating special effects (value addition) even on labels. Even another print solution provider in Bangalore successfully experimented special effects on liquor bottle labels which was liked very much by his customers although it found to be unviable since their  requirement was in millions.

Now the trend is that more and more offset print service providers setting up inhouse screen printing units for print finishing jobs instead of outsourcing for logistic and other reasons.

Surely, Offset printing, with the help of screen printing set up, helps printers offer value added service to customers. I have been hearing from different corners of the printing industry (read in some magazines)  that offset can’t flourish anymore on its own without the print finish support from screen printing process.

However, to play a greater role, screen printing has to be a technology driven (not the manual method which discourages many print buyers or printers). Although there are now advanced screen printing machines available, who will provide the advanced knowledge in screen printing?

I only hope, more and more DMI like institutes take birth in India to offer advanced screen printing knowledge and make the entire printing industry grow with passion for creativity.

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