The origins

Pad printing, or tampography, is an indirect printing system for decorating surfaces, flat or otherwise, with a degree of definition that other systems cannot deliver. The current procedure consists of the transfer of colour from an engraved cliché to the object to be decorated using a silicone pad.

The origins of this technique are as old as the art of printing itself, and indeed it is no more than the natural evolution of the transfer of images carved into wood or stone, coated with ink and transferred onto paper or fabric.

The first references to the use of pad printing date back to the 17th century when the system was used in England to decorate plates and ceramicware. The same procedure was used in Switzerland in the 18th century to decorate watch faces, which until such time were decorated by hand. The system remained limited to these two sectors until the 1960s and did not undergo any significant changes until the advent of silicone rubber and increasingly more specific inks and clichés in the early 1970s simplified the procedure for this printing technique considerably.

New guidelines from designers in the 1980s calling for increasingly more complex and highly coloured designs gave new impetus to pad printing and thanks to the simplicity and high quality of the same it quickly became the most widely adopted technique in the plastic industry, establishing itself as the new printing technique initially in Germany, then throughout the rest of Europe.

For that matter, other well-established printing techniques already existed: silk-screen printing for printing onto large flat and round surfaces; hot printing, which thanks to the metallic films used offered and still does offer brilliant effects and offset printing, which thanks to its speed is still the most popular technique for large-scale productions and above all for printing on to plastic cylinders such as jars for the food and cosmetics industries, but none of these systems can boast the versatility and flexibility offered by pad printing, which can be used for all types of materials and surfaces.

Today

In an increasingly more competitive and selective market, which is often detrimental to quality, product customisation and identification play a fundamental role in distinguishing products, enabling them to compete on an equal level with increasingly more aggressive competitors. From household appliances to sports goods, from electronic products to promotional articles, from containers for cosmetics to medical products, from bags to shoes, from vehicle parts to aircraft parts and even food products such as biscuits, sweets, chocolate and much, much more, NOTHING IS UNPRINTABLE NOW!!!

It is within this framework that pad printing (COMEC ITALIA) can make an important contribution towards differentiating one product from another. Pad printing offers unbeatable flexibility for the decoration of irregular surfaces and small objects, is an excellent addition to silk-screen printing or other printing systems and also represents a valid alternative for larger work such as satellite dishes, balls, mineral oil drums, gas bottles, etc. Even digital printing, which is now present in many industrial sectors from posters to t-shirts and CDs and some claim will be the only printing system in the future, will never be a substitute for pad printing when it comes to complex materials and surfaces, as thanks to the wide range of inks and colours it can be used to print onto paper, silicone, metal, glass and, as mentioned previously, even food products, with incredible precision.

The current range of pad printing machines extends from low cost, manual bench machines for samples to computerised, servo-assisted work centres, to large machines with UV drying systems for high-quality industrial and technological applications, encompassing a series of intermediate machines with variable characteristics and costs but always of the highest quality. The progress and technological advances made in the field of pad printing machines will enable us to obtain better and better prints on an increasingly wider range of products, more so than for any other printing method and whilst technology continues to evolve we can only imagine where this wonderful printing technique will take us.