Pad printing has been a conventional method of printing on curved and uneven surfaces for a long time. It involves the transfer of 2D images or texts onto a 3D surface with the help of flexible silicone pads. It is a spin-off of conventional offset printing. Recently, digital printing has paved the way for printing on the surfaces with variable diameter using digital cylinder printing technique. This process directly strews ink over a curved surface which is in a close vicinity to the cylindrical printheads using digital imaging systems. Additionally, this process uses a robot automation system which tracks the surface of the substrate and calculates the angle of inclination with help of a computer-aided software. This ensures that the substrate and the printheads are always less than 5 mm of distance, which is the optimum distance to get a high-resolution print. Thus, digital cylinder printing offers a faster turnaround time than the conventional pad printing method, due to the single-pass mechanism and no requirement of pre-setups for printing. Many companies such as Inkcups, PadJet, Automated Marking, Inc., and BottleJET are offering products to print on curved surfaces. Such developments are going to boost the digital printing ink market in the coming years.

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