The flexo vs digital debate has been a big part of the label printing industry for years. As new sample packet printing technologies emerge, there is always the debate on which one has the edge, and manufacturers often point out the importance of qualities such as speed, convenience, lower price or initial setup time when speaking about the quality and value offered by each printing technology.

 

So let’s try to define each printing method and what it has going for it. Flexographic (flexo) printers uses special relief plates that have to be redesigned each time a new label design is produced. The process is a roll-feed printing process that is extremely fast and used for printing as many as 500-2000 labels per minute. If you have a lot of labels to print very quickly, then this is the method that is best suited for your printing process.

 

Digital printing is, as the name would suggest, a more simple digital method that doesn’t require any complex setup or any special plates. The process simply works by converting your digital images into roster images that are then fed into the printer to recreate the image by using it as a map. While this process is generally simpler and less expensive than flexo, it’s also slower. Most experts will recommend it for business owners who are just starting out and have no need for a large volume of labels to be printed at record speeds.