What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Flexography?
Flexography’s chief advantages are that it is fast, adaptable, good for color and continuous images and employs ink that dries nearly instantly. Its disadvantages include the cost of its plates, the consumption of costly stock and the large amount of time needed for setup. The flexographic printing process can be configured to meet many sets of printing needs, but it is expensive and time consuming.
Flexography can be adapted and set up to perform complex print jobs even in nonstandard formats. This flexibility, from which the process takes its name, is a valuable asset to printers looking to change quickly in response to new demands and market trends.
The printing plates used in flexography must be custom made using a laser-guided design process. This is time consuming and can be very costly, with a single plate costing anywhere between $75 and $100 on average. The long runup time to production can also limit the effectiveness of just how adaptable flexography is.
Flexography uses an extremely definite amount of ink in a given project. This makes it easy to estimate costs for ink and other supplies because measurements in the process are made so exactly and have such a low rate of error over the course of a project.
