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I am a screen printer by trade and can confirm the resilience of the inks used. I use solvent based enamel inks that are UV resistant and should outlast the materials they are printed on, especially paper.
I have anodised aluminium screen printed business cards and the aluminium scratches more than the printed ink.
I believe pad printing uses similar inks and techniques to screen printing, only using an engraved plate to retain the ink rather than pushing it through the mesh.
You can do DIY pad printing onto drinking glasses and the like using screens and balloons but the accuracy isn’t there really.
Screen printing is often used for the Lume as you can create super high build screens that deposit a greater volume of particle and hence give a great brightness of lume.
That paulin dial has quite a high build on the pink and could be screen printed.
Manson7am-
The Paulin dial is definitely pad printed, I know from their blog about it. It’s normal with pad printing dials that you do multiple applications to build up the thickness of the print.
Also pad printing ink is quite a lot thicker / denser than screen printing ink - it needs to be quite sticky to pull away from the silicone pad.
@starfish&coffee the colour is not from the anodising. It’s anodised silver and then dyed blue by hand. As I said, I don’t know how colour fast it is.
Regal
I can't claim any knowledge of how light-fast the Paulin dial is specifically, but the dial iself is anodised and dyed aluminium. The printing is pad printing, so it's a little different to screen printing and very different to inkjet - the ink is much thicker and more opaque, and you can use two-part inks which cure very hard. Light fastness of screen prints has historically been very good, the issue is often more to do with the yellowing of the paper, but more modern water-based inks are less durable. I'm not an expert on how the pad printing inks compare in that regard, but given that you have pad printed dials that still have bright red and blue text that are >70 years old I wouldn't be surprised if the colour fastness of the printing is very good.
Digital/inkjet printing is basically a no-go for watch dials (above Swatch level at least) - you can't print acceptably sharp lines and text at the sizes involved.