Roland UV Ink Lifespan?

[splizaat]

Hey Guys, we're extremely well rounded in solvent printing but we've been subbing out a lot of UV printing work lately with stuff printed directly to the substrate. My question is about lifespan of UV ink....as of now, we're telling customers if we UV print direct to substrate on the Roland UV machine that they can expect about 1-1.5 years outdoors. If we decide add laminate, about 3years.

Is this a gross underestimation? overestimation? Just curious what everyone else is generally "rating" the lifespan of the roland uv ink at...don't get all technical and talk about environmental variables etc...I'm talking in general.

Matt

 

[Gino]

I'm sure all the various manufacturers have specific specs on their respected machines, but 1-1/2 years is what we say for Cor-X.

Metal, acrylic, PVC and most anything else outdoors is 3 to 4 years for ours without lamination. Laminating might add another 18 months or so. We've had one failure and it was recently on acrylic and we're still not sure what caused it. Not bad for 5 years.

 

[synergy_jim]

I have some stuff out there looking good after 5 years on PVC. I'd say 3 years is pretty safe.

 

[Gino]

Gino you're talking about UV prints off your Dili/Agfa?

Sounds like you're getting some good durability out of that ink.

I know when we used to sub out UV prints years back I couldn't believe how quickly some of the coro prints faded. But that was a while back and I'm sure inksets have improved since then.

Believe it or not, it's not fading that tends to fail, but the frickin' ink flakes off the Cor-X. However, just recently, we think we figured out our Cor-X problem.

Seems to be where we get our Cor-X from. Just got our second order from a new supplier and you could actually smell the corona on it. The prints even looked different.... and I don't know how to explain that one. They just look better. Also, they were free from dirt, contaminates and just about anything else. we still cleaned them, but it was like being in heaven.

I'm going to start a thread about this very subject, probably later today.
​