Screen printing, pad printing and digital printing machinery

Screen printing pushes the ink through a tensioned mesh and lays it directly onto the part, so it performs on flat or regularly curved surfaces and on large areas of colour. Pad printing is an indirect process: the ink is loaded into an etched cliché and a silicone pad picks it up and transfers it to the part, adapting to its shape. That is why pad printing handles small, concave, convex or irregular parts and fine detail, where the mesh cannot reach.

It depends on the geometry of the part, the size of the print and the volume. If the surface is flat or regularly cylindrical and the design covers a wide area, screen printing usually pays off. If the part is small, three-dimensional or irregular in shape, or the design is highly detailed, pad printing. If runs are short, every part carries a different design or the design is full colour, UV or DTF digital printing. IBPRINT works with all three processes, so our advice is not tied to selling a particular machine: tell us about the part, the material and the production rate.

UV or DTF digital printing prints straight from the file, with no screen and no cliché, so there is no fixed cost per design and it reproduces gradients and photographs with no limit on colours. It wins on personalisation, short runs and many different designs. Screen printing and pad printing lay down more ink, match a Pantone with mixed ink and lower the cost per part on long runs of the same design.

No. IBPRINT does not print to order: it designs, builds, sells and maintains the machinery other companies use to decorate their parts, and distributes the inks and consumables for that line. Its customers are part-decoration workshops and manufacturers that print their own products.

Both. IBPRINT has its own engineering and automation department and machining workshop in Igualada, where it designs and builds equipment and custom automation. Alongside that it distributes inks and consumables from leading brands, which it does not manufacture.

No. The catalogue runs from a one-colour benchtop machine, designed for a one-person workshop, to full-servo automatic lines with robots for high-volume production. Advice is included in both cases.

All of Spain, from our base in Igualada (Barcelona), and we also ship machinery and consumables to France. Technical service is provided both in our workshop and at the customer's plant.

Because almost nothing is sold off the shelf as is. The configuration of a machine depends on the part, the number of colours, the format and the production rate, and inks are chosen by substrate and by the resistance required. Each piece of equipment is offered on quotation, with its specific technical sheet and configuration.