中文If you’ve spent any time running offset presses at high speed, you know the particular frustration of picking — that moment when the ink’s stickiness is just strong enough to pull fibers right off the paper surface, leaving you with damaged sheets, unplanned downtime, and a freshly worsening mood.
It’s one of those problems that’s easy to underestimate until it starts eating into your production. And as printing speeds increase and the paper supply chain throws up more quality variability than it used to, the picking problem is getting harder to manage with standard inks alone.
hubergroup Print Solutions has a direct response to this: low-tack versions of its NewV UV offset ink range.
Understanding the Tack Problem
Tack, at its most basic, is the stickiness of a printing ink. High tack has genuine advantages — better ink transfer, sharper dot gain, cleaner printing on smoother substrates. But high tack on sensitive or uncoated materials is where things get complicated.
When the ink’s pull is stronger than the paper’s surface integrity, the paper loses. You get picking: small chunks of the paper surface torn away during printing. On lower-quality papers or boards — the kind that’s been showing up with increasing frequency as supply chains tighten — this problem is amplified. Run those stocks at high speed, and you compound the risk further.
Lisa-Marie Spring, product manager for SF/UV at hubergroup, explains: “High tack offers advantages such as improved ink transfer and dot gain, it can also cause so-called picking on sensitive papers or uncoated board — damage to the paper surface during the printing process. Low-tack inks are specifically designed to counteract this effect.”
What the New NewV Variants Offer
The new low-tack versions cover four series within the NewV range: NewV pack premium, NewV set LED, NewV pack MGA, and NewV poly MGA. Critically, hubergroup has built them to maintain the same rheological properties as the existing high-tack versions. This means printers aren’t trading one set of performance characteristics for another — they’re getting a formulation tuned for stability under difficult conditions without sacrificing the print behavior they’ve come to rely on.
The practical benefits are meaningful: reduced paper tear-out, more uniform ink separation, less emulsion disruption, and lower risk of delamination on multi-layer substrates. Put together, those translate directly into more consistent output, fewer wasted sheets, and production lines that don’t need to slow down every time a batch of variable-quality stock rolls in.
Why This Matters Now
The packaging print market is under constant pressure to do more with less. Faster presses, tighter deadlines, more SKUs, less tolerance for waste. The idea of slowing production to accommodate problem substrates is increasingly untenable.
Low-tack ink formulations aren’t new in principle, but having them available across a broad, well-established UV offset range — in versions already proven for performance in premium packaging applications — makes them genuinely useful for a wide range of printers rather than a niche workaround.
For operations dealing with fluctuating paper quality (and right now, that’s most operations), the low-tack NewV series offers a practical tool to maintain process stability without redesigning the workflow around the problem.
Source: The Packman
