With our advanced UV and LED UV technologies, we are setting new standards in the digital printing industry. Whether on flexible or rigid materials, our UV and LED UV systems offer the highest precision, brilliant colour reproduction and enable seamless adaptation to your specific requirements. Discover how our innovative technologies can make your printing projects more efficient and sustainable.
UV curing technologies in industrial digital printing offer higher productivity, substrate versatility and low heat build-up on the substrate. They are ideal for coding and marking, such as printing best-before dates on packaging, as well as for applications with short runs and frequently changing content, for example in the areas of mailing, signage or short-run printing. Our UV systems make it possible to realise individual print jobs in high quality without long preparation times and expensive printing plates.
Our UV technology can print on almost all flexible and rigid substrates, as well as plastics, glass, wood and metal using the inkjet process, and 3D materials with corners or curves can also be printed directly, opening up new fields of application in the area of industrial printing (direct printing on industrial products) in the future. By integrating the print heads into the production line, it is now possible to print the required content or graphics directly onto the end product inline. This saves time and resources.
However, industrial inkjet printing is not limited to the graphic design of a product. Thanks to ever-improving head technology and precision machines, it is now possible to print defined, extremely thin or delicate functional layers in the semiconductor industry. 3D printers, which can use inkjet technology to produce any 3D shape in individual runs at low cost, are also in vogue.
Inkjet systems are now used across the board on almost all materials and machine concepts. The range of applications extends from large-format printing with mobile UV systems to industrial printing on wood/PVC with very large printing widths and high-speed sheet-fed processing machines or label printing machines. The curing systems required for this must therefore fulfil a variety of different requirements, such as a compact and lightweight design, a long service life and extreme performance.
Our portfolio of UV systems (UV lamp and LED UV) can fulfil almost any customer requirement. Thanks to the modular design of the UV and LED UV systems, customised systems for curing industrial products are also possible without a great deal of effort.
For example, LED UV pinning can be combined with UV lamp final curing or several powerful LED UV systems of different wavelengths. Depending on the requirements, it is possible to choose between focussed and non-focussed LED UV systems or different reflector geometries for the UV lamp technology. If a water-based ink is to be dried, IST METZ naturally also offers products and expertise in this area, e.g. in the field of cardboard or corrugated board direct printing.
In the field of UV finishing, hybrid solutions using standard and LED UV technology offer new possibilities for special haptic effects on printed products. The combination of LED UV units for ‘pinning’, the pre-curing of colours in the printing process, and a standard UV system for final drying achieves optimum results. Another niche for special print finishes has been opened up. However, as the use of UV inks is not economical or desirable in some areas, a combination of water-based ink and hot-air infrared drying is used, for example, in the area of corrugated board or cardboard direct printing.
With compact designs and energy-saving LED UV systems, our sister company IST INTECH's LED UV systems are the gold standard in inkjet solutions. Manufactured in the UK, our UV lamp and LED UV curing systems are widely used for digital label printing and large format printing. They are available in various configurations and can be used individually or as part of a fully integrated modular system.
IST INTECH's product range is specifically designed for use in digital printing applications. This includes so-called pinning systems. These light sources are designed to hold the dots between the colours in a digital printing application at high power and only fully cure at the end with a final cure. The portfolio includes a wide variety of modular systems, from air-cooled, very lightweight to LED systems with IP54 for installation in damp and dusty environments.
