The quality of clear vs rubber stamps
Colour:
Standard rubber stamps are always coloured and opaque. Silicone rubber stamps are clear.
Polymer is naturally clear, and can be coloured any colour whilst still being transparent for easy positioning.
Polymer stamps normally pick up a yellow colour in sunlight. Eventually this will dry the stamp out and after a long time will make it curl and even crack.
We make non-yellowing clear polymer which will never pick up a yellow tint however long it is left in sunlight.
Daylight stamps have a bright yellow colour when washed out and this will fade to a pale lemon colour after hardening completely under water. This colour is natural and permanent.
Image Quality:
Standard rubber can hold very fine detail when laser engraved and very good detail when vulcanised. Silicone has different ink transferring qualities.
The image quality of liquid polymer stamps is generally slightly worse than those made from sheet polymer but can hold very fine detail.
We make our clear stamps using imagebright, which is a collimating filter and guarantees a perfect replication of the negative and allows the finest lines to be held.
If you make stamps using daylight you can make the finest images possible and make the most intricate stamps. The easiest way to see the quality of an image is to make stamps from photographs, and your daylight stamp will hold any photograph as a stamp.
Ink usage:
Rubber based stamps can be used with any inks, polymer however are designed for use with water based inks.
Long term use of solvent based inks with polymer stamps will cause them to curl and swell a little. Having said this you can easily get a long life out of a polymer when using solvent based inks by just cleaning soon after use, probably a few hundred stampings.
Daylight stamps are just like normal stamps in this respect and are perfect with water based inks and will be slowly affected by long term solvent use (but you can always make another one if you do a lot of solvent based stamping).
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