Hello Photo Engineer,
The ink treating, usually heat setting in roto gravure, is one way of avoiding holdout, set-off or delamination of inks from the paper. At one time not very long ago (under ten years) supercalendered papers, which would be better for this process, where common mostly just in Europe. Now over 2M tonnes of this are used each year, giving better quality and more availability to companies running gravure operations. Gravure inks tend to be solvent based, though the long tack and the use of heatsetting makes them very durable. Their are also water based and synthetic gravure inks, which have another benefit of not being volatile. If handled improperly, gravure inks can ignite or explode.
Let us imagine that many printing problems are now solved, otherwise we would not have any backing papers. So in gravure, or specifically roto gravure, the economies of scale mean 800 feet per minute of around 40" to 60" widths on smaller presses, up to near 3000 feet per minute of around 120" widths on the largest and fastest presses. That should give people an idea of volumes of printing needed. Maybe the entire roll film paper backing in the world today only represents under one month of output, compared to maybe several years ago it was two or more months of output. We have to consider that presses who have been doing this printing are experiencing a reduction of orders, and might not be that interested in doing runs of this backing paper.
Something that might help me, would be to understand the assembly machines. If the paper backing is on rolls, individual strips, or uncut 40" to 120" drums. Who does the cutting could be a factor in quality control. As one might imagine, even the smaller gravure presses are high speed, so an error could encompass numerous rolls of film. I would bet that if the existing companies doing the printing indicated that they did not want to do the runs in the near future, there would be other companies willing to step in.
So for now, I do appreciate all the great information. I have left some detailed notes on my Palm Pilot for early 2007, so that I can speak with the paper companies, and some of the companies in the US running these large roto gravure operations. I will take some backing paper with me, and ask about reproducing it. I enjoy these sorts of technical challenges.
Ciao!
Gordon Moat
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