DuraTech Industries has both screen printing and digital printing capabilities. Both offer our customers varying advantages as separate printing processes. However, every so often, a customer has a project where digital printing is the ideal process, but may require combining it with some print elements from screen printing, or vice versa. You might be asking, “Why combine the two processes?”

John Reiter, one of DuraTech’s Senior Sales Representatives, shares how two of our customers have greatly benefited from doing this with some of their labels and/or graphic overlays.

Life Fitness

Reasons for digital printing

1. The gradients are so fine; they cannot practically be done using conventional screen printing. Digital printing can give an incredibly fine gradient with none of the negative effects that can happen in screen printing. For example: moiré, dots filling in, and larger dots than is wanted by the customer.
2. There are many small running parts; they have many, different stock keeping units, or
   SKU’s, which are mostly small runners. They have many different languages that we print parts for, but the usage can be only 25 or 50 parts. Multiply that by hundreds of SKU’s and you get some incredible cost savings.

Reasons to add screen printing

1. On many parts they need a tinted window to highlight or change the look of the LED coming through. This can really only be done using the screen printed process.
2. The white color for digital can skew to the yellow side. Life Fitness wanted a very vibrant white and the only way to do this was to screen print it.
3. Selective textures can be added to the front of a reverse printed overlay to give unique textures, and/or hard coated textures. This can only be done with the screen printed process.

Mercury Marine

Reason for digital printing

Their parts and service department guarantees to their customers that they will stock all parts for engines up to 10 years after they obsolete them from their production. As time rolls on, the requirements go way down. Most Mercury engine decals have many colors, so the cost in small quantities is huge. By printing these decals digitally, we can give them a reasonable price so that their customers can get a reasonable price as their overall volumes go down.

Reason for screen printing

Because they have a 5 year exterior test procedure and expectation, we needed to incorporate a screen printed UV clear coat. This clear coat, along with our new digital inks, allowed these decals to pass the 5 year outdoor Mercury standard.

By combining these processes, our customers have a better balance of price and design flexibility with their decals and overlays. Contact our Sales Team today to discuss how this may work for your projects.