The difference between silk screen and hot stamping

1. Different ways

Silk screen: refers to the use of silk screen as the plate base, and through the photosensitive plate making method, made into a silk screen printing plate with pictures and texts.

Hot stamping: refers to hot stamping text and patterns of colored foil and other materials on the surface of the substrate, or embossing various patterns with hot pressing.

2. Different printing methods

Screen printing: Screen printing consists of five elements, screen printing plate, squeegee, ink, printing table and substrate. When printing, pour ink on one end of the screen printing plate, use a squeegee to apply a certain pressure to the ink part on the screen printing plate, and at the same time move toward the other end of the screen printing plate at a uniform speed, the ink is removed from the image and text by the squeegee during the movement. Part of the mesh is squeezed onto the substrate.

Hot stamping: The heated hot stamping head is used to hot stamp the metal or paint laminate on the hot stamping film to the surface of the processed workpiece to achieve the purpose of decoration or marking. The four basic conditions of the hot stamping process: the hot stamping head includes a hot stamping template, a heater, and a pressure transmission mechanism.

Simply put, the main difference between silk printing and hot stamping is "plate making". Silk screen printing belongs to plate printing. It needs to make a screen plate, one plate per color, and then repeated color registration to make the finished product! Hot stamping is a non-plate printing, and does not require plate making. 

The pattern is directly hot stamped on the bottle through the hot stamping head heating. For silk screen printing, because of the limitation of color registration, there are too many colors, and there will be a problem of inaccurate color registration, that is, it is impossible to make gradient colors; the screen plate produced is costly, so the more you print, the average to each cost of the screen version of the bottle, so screen printing is suitable for large-volume, less-color orders; for hot stamping, it is obvious that it does not require plate making, which provides technical support for private customization. From an industry perspective, small batches, multiple designs and short fashion cycles have become consumer trends and concepts.