Beyond Paper: Opportunities in Specialty Printing

Direct-to-substrate UV printers, Copeland says, offer the widest gamut of things that can be decorated directly without involving weeding, transferring, or heat pressing.

With these technologies, it’s also about the material being right, with the additions of adhesion promoters or pretreatments to help ink adhere to areas where it might not. Because these promoters essentially raise the surface energy of the area being printed, Copeland says this is a very sample-intensive industry.