You can have the most talented designer in the world at your disposal, but if you’re printing onto paperboard all their creativity and effort can go to waste if your chosen material isn’t the right one for the job. The only real way to tell how your finished packaging is going to look is to get your design onto the printing press, so Metsä Board initiated a PrintSpec study to compare the offset printing performance of various fresh fibre and recycled paperboards.
Lauri Järvinen, Technical Marketing Manager at Metsä Board, explains the goal of the study: “The initial idea was to compare the colour gamut – how accurately a print design can be replicated in terms of colours – of recycled paperboard with that of our folding boxboard,” he explains. “However, the study produced a lot of other valuable data too, which helped us to build a very good picture of the overall printing performance of the various products that we were testing.”
“We had never really studied the printing performance of fresh fibre paperboard against products containing recycled fibres in this way before. We of course assumed that fresh fibre boards would perform better, but we didn’t have any hard data to back up this assumption,” Lauri points out.
Roll the presses!
The study included a selection of Metsä Board’s own paperboards and four products from other suppliers, two of which were recycled paperboards. The samples were delivered in sheet form to Metsä Board’s partner Offset Kolmio, a printer in Hämeenlinna, southern Finland. There, they would be put through their paces in a PrintSpec offset printing test.
“As well as the colour gamut, we also examined the overprinting performance, the dot gain and the grey balance. This gave us a comprehensive overview of each paperboard’s printing performance,” Lauri says.
Hard data to enable optimal material choices
After the printing test the results were analysed and each paperboard was given an overall percentage score to indicate its offset printing performance. A score of 80% and above indicate very good performance; the fresh fibre products comfortably achieved this level while the recycled products had scores ranging from 56 to 68%.
“A high-quality printing result is a combination of lots of different factors, all of which we were able to study in this process,” Lauri says. “It is essential to note that paperboards made with recycled fibres are a valid choice for applications where print designs are simple and the aesthetics of the packaging are less important than the function it performs. On the other hand, complex packaging designs with lots of colours and special effects need a material that is up to the challenge, and the test results show that fresh fibre paperboard is clearly the best choice for these kinds of applications.”
“PrintSpec is the ideal tool for colour professionals with an interest in producing high-quality print complying with the targets and tolerances of ISO 12647/G7. Metsä Board folding boxboards show a wide colour gamut and have an excellent ability to maintain colour stability over the full print run.” Kimmo Jokinen, CEO Offset Kolmio Oy.
