Digital sampling of rotating production: is it effective?
Due to the above advantages, even if the final design is printed with rotary screen printing on an open rotary printer, printing digital samples seems to be a good idea. However, there is one main aspect to keep in mind here.
The quality of digital printing is much better than rotary screen printing. Therefore, the resolution of digital samples is much higher than what can be reproduced by traditional printers. If the quality of the sample is much better than the quality of the final print, then you may go astray. On the other side-the printing company's side-the printer could not copy the samples, which led to discussions about quality and final production runs. The aforementioned liability issues (comparison of samples and production runs) apply here.
In the 1990s, when digital printing first appeared, it used so-called raster simulation, which can simulate traditional printed rasters into digital files. This allows you to create a "perfect" sample: a digital sample that perfectly predicts the appearance of traditional rotary printing.
Sampling dilemma
Before you start printing a new design, you must decide how it will eventually be produced. On this basis, you must decide how to make samples. The Flat Screen Printer Factory, which has rotary screen printing and digital textile printing, has three possibilities in terms of samples:
Management expectations
No matter how you turn things around, managing customer expectations when sampling is the most important thing. Especially if you choose to do web screen printing digitally, it is important to manage expectations. The results of rotary screen printing will never be as detailed as digital samples. The same applies if you make digital samples and the customer is so satisfied in the end that he requires mass production. Manage expectations and outline options: high-volume printing with rotary screen printing is cheaper, but this does mean that the quality will never be as good as a sample. Digital proofing and digital printing are becoming more and more common, but digital printing (especially long version printing) is much more expensive than rotary screen printing.
There are quite a few differences between these two types of printing. You can still use digital sampling-which is much faster than traditional sampling-for rotary screen printing. However, you need to manage customer expectations well. In this way, you can avoid problems and take full advantage of both printing formats.