Can surfaces become digital prints?

If you look around you, you’ll soon see that printed graphics are everywhere. On the floor, the walls and the table. In kitchens, offices and bathrooms. Despite this, printers, at times, forget that we only are a small part of the whole. We print, and we do it very well, but as a general rule that’s all we do. We don’t design or create, we don’t always even install. We just print. But when dealing with the décor market, a change of mindset is in order. I’ve become convinced that the name of the game should be ‘surfaces’.

So, what do I mean by surfaces? Well, the term applies to all sorts of applications, including flooring, furniture, cladding, kitchens and bathroom walls. The possibilities are endless, but we need to keep in mind that producing these sorts of applications is more complex than simply printing a graphic image.  

The market, which is enormous, remains dominated by analogue gravure printing technology. There are advantages of printing analogue: it’s simple, easy (provided you understand how), cheap and the quality is consistent. But there are downsides as well.

Take the limited design and customization options for one. Hotels and restaurant chains want to convey their own identities. They are on the lookout for new ways to get their brand in front of the customer. Digital printing is well placed to fulfil these needs.

So far so good, but as I’ve already made clear, the world of décor printing is very different. The use of graphic CMYK inks would result in a too narrow colour gamut, or it would create metamerisms, a phenomenon where the colours of two objects appear the same under a particular light source, but actually have different spectral energy distributions. This is an issue because, when a different kind of light source is used, the color difference between them can be revealed.

So it might initially seem as if all the great technology we’ve got will be rendered useless when it comes to décor and surfaces.

Fortunately, Agfa had a head start when it came to understanding surfaces markets. Working together on R&D with companies like UNILIN, a leading global manufacturer of flooring, gave us the knowhow we needed to understand the market. Agfa started developing speciality inks for the flooring and surfaces industry, using the same pigment colours as gravure printing technologies. The introduction of a special red ink and a light black ink meant that printing digitally became viable for the surfaces industries. Agfa’s colour system has millions of different colours and can print any design, even switch designs on the fly.

There are still hurdles to overcome, as companies creating laminate surfaces print onto a special paper that can later be impregnated with a melamine resin and then pressed together to make a strong sandwich-like print. The finished product is called a HPL (High Pressure Laminate).

A particular challenge of creating HPLs is that the ink needs to stay where it is during impregnation, but at the same time it can’t contain a binder as the melamine would not penetrate the paper and consequently would not allow it to be pressed correctly, creating delamination and bubbles.

As Agfa came to understand the market, we began to explore potential solutions to this. We dismissed UV inks, as the UV ink layer would hinder the impregnation step, making it difficult to print dark designs. Agfa came to the conclusion that it simply had to think differently and reinvent the way to look at print.

The InterioJet system is the first to change the surfaces industry. It uses a water-based non-binder ink, pigment gravure colours and is capable of printing more than 150 tons of paper per year, or a little over 2 million sqm on one system.  

I’m confident that the switch to digital in the surfaces industry will happen in much the same way it did in screen, textile and commercial print and already I feel quite a bit of pride that I spend my day surrounded by print. It starts in the shower, and continues at my desk in the office. I walk to the company showroom on a nice laminate and, at the end of the day, I eat my dinner at the new wood grain décor furniture that I’ve bought. In a very real sense, our world has already become a big surface print.

Authored by Mike Horsten, Global Business Manager, InterioJet at Agfa