Are LEGO stickers pad printed?

[Tusserte]

I recently bought 6x sticker sheets from the LEGO Darth Vader Meditation Chamber 75296 set and noticed an interesting detail.  The different colors in the image were all aligned slightly differently relative to each other. I attached a picture of all six so you can see for yourself. It's most noticeable when you look at the minifig eyebrows or the red/blue rectangles in the badges. I've seen this color alignment issue before on minifigs which is characteristic of pad printing, but I've never seen it on a sticker sheet before. Has anyone else seen this before? Is LEGO pad printing their stickers and is this new?

 

[deraven]

Pad printing is possible for decals but would be needlessly complex and expensive.  The most common printing method for commercial decals is screen printing which, along with various other types including pad printing, applies each color as a separate layer and can result in minor offsets like that.

[JopieK]

They use solvent printers (basically large format inkjet printers). I assume they don't do it themselves but they hire sign makers to do it, there is a lot of difference in quality, some stickers fall apart (even if they were never applied). As the head cannot print every color at once you sometimes see small alignment differences, especially if the belt that drives the head of the printer is getting older. Also the head might not have been calibrated well if there are bigger issues.

[Tusserte]

Thanks for the responses. Screen printing would also make a lot of sense. It wasn't apparent to me that it would be cheaper than pad printing.