With the rise of digital printing, you may be wondering—what exactly are printing blankets still used for in this day and age? From textiles and fabrics to paper printing, custom decorative blankets, and more, these versatile materials continue serving all kinds of key roles for both large-scale commercial printers and small creative businesses.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore what modern printing blankets are made of, what makes them so uniquely suited for transferring images and inks, what types of printers utilize them, how design techniques take blankets’ specialized properties into account, and interesting niche applications like how to make print on demand blankets you can sell online. Let’s delve into everything that heavy-duty blankets do to bring printed goods to life!
The Unique Makeup and Properties of Printing Blankets
Printing blankets look deceptively plain, but their carefully engineered construction gives them game-changing properties ideal for image transfer using Roller method printing presses. Here are the key things to know:
Materials: Most printing blankets have three layers—the top coating takes the ink, a thick middle layer of strong compressible fabric conforms to images, and a base provides rigidity to attach to rollers. Top coatings utilize vulcanized rubber while mid sections rely on woolen felt, cotton, synthetic fibers or foam.
Performance Properties: The compressibility of the middle layer allows blankets to conform to the plate, plate cylinder and substrate surface they print to. At the same time, they’re rigid enough for roller pressure to go through them. The materials also withstand solvent inks and fountain solutions.
Release Characteristics: Printing blankets have specifically engineered nonstick surfaces that pick the ink up from the plate cleanly, carry a perfect ink film thickness, transfer all the ink to the substrate, then release rapidly without issues like picking or piling that ruin image quality.
Durability: These fabrics can withstand over a million impressions without failing or degrading print quality. Heat and chemical resistance also enable longevity.
In short, compounds in the coating, fibers in the middle layer, base stability and construction quality all combine to make printing blankets ideal ink transfer surfaces for offset presses, flexographic printers, gravure printing, letterpress and more. Now let’s explore how.
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Typical Applications and Printers That Rely on Blankets
While electronic on-demand printing like Inkjet and Electrophotography have greatly displaced analog technologies for short-run printing, conventional methods leveraging printing plates and blankets still dominate long run jobs. Here are some key equipment types that utilize them:
Offset Presses: In offset lithography—the most common form of commercial printing—inked images on plates transfer to rubber blankets, which then offset the images onto paper or other media. From business cards and brochures to product packaging and books, offset handles huge volumes efficiently. Blankets flex to allow offsets.
Flexographic Printing Presses: Flexo uses raised-image relief plates to print on packaging, shrink wrap, bags, boxes and other product containers. As substrates pass between plate cylinders and impression cylinders, printing blankets transfer the ink. Their compressibility is critical for conformability.
Letterpress Equipment: In commercial letterpress for things like embossing or die-cutting, printing blankets also sit between plates and substrates to transfer the high-pressure impression cleanly without damaging fragile plates.
Gravure Printing Gear: Used for very high volume printing jobs on paper, cardboard, plastic films and foils, gravure relies on intricately engraved cylinders transferring ink onto rubber blankets, which then print onto the substrates as they pass through the systems.
Without the ink transfer properties that these specialized printing blankets offer as an intermediary surface between plates and materials, printers could not achieve consistent, layered and durable applications with commercial scale and speed.
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Design and Image Considerations for Printer Blankets
The unique characteristics and behaviors of blankets used in commercial printers require images and graphics to be specially optimized. Prepress operators have to take into account:
Repeating Patterns: As plates apply images across printing blankets in bands, repeating elements must flow visually across to prevent noticeable breaks between tile edges.
Compression Factors: Image areas on plates compress blankets far more than blank areas, affecting how positive and negative spaces spread. Designs account for dot gains.
Direction and Alignment: Patterns and designs need precise alignment across cylinders using gripper edges and markers so they hit blankets straight to prevent distortions.
Color Trapping Strategies: Where colors print atop one another, builders create subtle overlaps and overprints rather than abutments to prevent white gaps if blankets shift slightly.
By considering blankets’ mechanical dynamics during prepress, finished print jobs reveal graphics clearly, evenly and attractively at scale. Next we’ll look at some unique applications.
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Niche Applications for Printing Blankets
Beyond high volume commercial print jobs, purpose-built printing blankets serve some interesting niche functions leveraging their transfer capabilities:
Textile Printing: Specialty printing blankets with woven surfaces transfer dye inks evenly onto fabric used to make clothing, tapestries and all kinds of personal and home textiles printed with intricate designs.
Temporary Tattoos: Heat-activated tattoo decal paper runs between a printing blanket and impression cylinder so the transfers release cleanly onto the substrate, ready to apply inked motifs to skin.
3D Printing Molds: Some large 3D printers use a transfer process between printing blankets and matrices of liquid plastic resin to achieve smooth, consistent top layers with each impression.
Print-on-Demand Goods: Online print services utilize printing blankets to transfer customized digital designs during manufacture-on-order processes for products like how to make print on demand blankets.
From textiles to toners to tattoos, the list goes on. If you can dream up a decorative image, odds are a printer utilizing blankets brings it to fruition!
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The Takeaway: Why Printing Blankets Remain Indispensable
In an increasingly digital world, printing blankets certainly sound old school. But with unrivaled transfer capabilities key to applying images across vast surface areas accurately and efficiently, these fabrics continue to drive high volume presses across printing industry segments. As long as businesses and consumers demand physical goods emblazoned with logos, graphics and text en masse, the humble printing blanket will hum along behind the scenes doing what it does best—making visually vibrant finishes come to life exactly as intended each and every time.
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