Packaging & Labels

No — and be wary of any supplier who claims it does. Offset and flexo get cheaper per box as the run grows; digital cost per box is close to flat. Below roughly a few hundred units, and on heavily versioned work, digital wins clearly; above a few thousand, offset does. The right setup is not to make them compete: samples, prototypes and short runs go digital, volume goes to offset.

Not on a surface that touches food directly. The UV and UV DTF inks in our catalogue are not low-migration; a food-contact application needs a barrier layer and a low-migration ink system. Printing the outside of a pack, labels and display boxes carries no such restriction. If a food project is on the table, say so in the first conversation — which layer gets printed has to be settled before a machine is chosen.

The MC-300 U1 runs 3.6 m²/h at four passes on a 300 mm web — about 12 linear metres of film an hour, with the colour, white and varnish layers all included in that figure. Over an eight-hour shift, 25–28 m² is a realistic ceiling. If your monthly label volume pushes past that, the 30 cm class becomes the bottleneck, and the conversation turns to a second machine or to a flatbed printing the product directly.

At low volume a knife and a template will do, but repeatability runs out after the first hundred boxes. The MK-1612 reads the registration marks in the printed sheet, cuts board with the tangential knife, goes through corrugated with the oscillating tool and presses the creases. Oscillating cutting runs at 10–16 m²/h; on corrugated it is usually that figure, not the printer, that sets daily capacity.

The reference we publish on the ink side is 12 months of vertical exposure in a central European climate, for a label applied to a smooth surface. That is an outdoor figure — a jar label living on a shelf lasts far longer. What a crystal label will not survive is a dishwasher or constant abrasion, so on flasks, bottles and kitchenware tell the customer that before the order, not after.