Abstract
The market and technical developments for flexo printing system in Japan was behind to Europe and America. Today's market share of flexo printing in Japanese printing industry is only 9% and most field of flexo printing is occupied by corrugated cardboard printing and paper bag printing. Flexo printing has a lot of advantages, such as the use of environment-friendly inks, suitability to printing with many varieties of small lot and short delivery date and energy saving high speed printing. Printing quality in flexo printing has improved and come to be almost comparable with gravure printing or offset printing thanks to technical innovation namely high-performance printing press, high-quality ceramic anilox roll, chambered doctor-blade system, digital plate-making system and so on. Recently in Japan much interest for flexo printing process has been increased especially in flexible packaging industry, due to current environmental issues and demand for cost reduction. At present some issues for expanding of flexo market have been pointed out. These include cost reduction of materials and machines, improvement of performance of water based on flexo ink, and development of prepress technology suitable for flexo. Flexo printing is expected to be improved in performance, replace gravure printing in flexible packaging industry and offset printing in carton industry and be used in new markets in near future. It has been pointed out that the combination of flexo printing with other printing systems, such as offset printing and gravure printing will lead to creation of new demands and new markets.
