Full-Color Printed Glasses

The details

Full-Color Printed Glasses

Printing is addition, and that is the point. A UV inkjet head lays an opaque white underbase onto the glass, then CMYK on top of it, then cures the whole stack with ultraviolet light in a single pass. Because the white goes down first, the colors sit on an opaque ground rather than on clear glass, so a red stays red instead of turning into whatever is behind the glass.

That is what makes printing the right method for a real brand mark. A logo with three spot colors, a gradient, a drop shadow or a photograph in it cannot be etched — etching gives you one tone. Print it and you get the file as drawn, at 720 dpi, with type down to about five points still readable on the glass.

Position is flexible. A single-position print sits on the bowl face at up to 3.25 by 3 inches; on a stemless tumbler the print can wrap eight inches around the body, which is enough for a wide landscape logo or a repeating pattern. Choose a matte cure if the glass should look understated, gloss if the artwork is meant to be seen.

The honest limitation is that print is a layer, so it lives on the top rack rather than surviving a commercial under-counter machine indefinitely. Ours test past five hundred domestic cycles, which is well beyond the life of most event and gift glassware. For house glassware in a restaurant, etching is the longer-lived choice and we will tell you so.