Influence of Substrate and Screen Thread Count on Reproduction of Image Elements in Screen Printing

Abstract

The printing plate and its characteristics in the conventional printing techniques have a significant impact on print quality and image appearance. In screen printing, a weave of screen mesh i.e. a number of threads per cm, is the most important characteristic of the printing plate, hence the most relevant factor which defines printing quality. Print quality itself is a complex term that includes desired colour reproduction and satisfactory reproduction of image elements. In this paper focus was centred upon the reproduction of text and basic image elements (lines and dot
structure) when printing on non-absorbent and absorbent substrates with different screen thread counts. The image element analysis led to the conclusion that using mesh with higher thread count does not significantly improve the reproduction of image elements. However, it is a very important parameter for text reproduction since low thread count may result in poor readability.