Printing service is used by most organizations for varied functions such as marketing and intra-company communications. Therefore it is helpful to know about the basic working of the commonly used printing process called offset printing.
Offset printing can generate a large number of prints quickly, which makes it more economical than other technologies and also more well known. That is why for bulk orders any good printing company would recommend you to go for offset printing.
This printing technology uses oil-based ink, which the water can not dissolve. The offset printing gets its name from the fact that the designs are transferred in an indirect way from the plates to the paper by use of rubber blankets as the agents.
The first step is developing the images. Film negatives were used in the past for making images and then duplicating them to aluminum based printing plates. However, a modern printing company would now develop the plates directly by using an image setting system. This plate is then put on a cylinder with the correct side up. Then the water and ink are dispersed on the image plates, in that order. While the ink gets fixed to the image, the water gets attached to that part of the plate where there is no image so that the ink does not spread beyond the image.
After being painted with the ink, the image is kept on a rubber blanket which is on a different cylinder, resulting in the image to be inverted. The image is now printed with its right side looking up by cutting sheets of papers into appropriate size and placing them on a third cylinder.
Last steps of the printing job involve things such as stapling, gluing or organizing the printed sheets in line with the instructions of the client, and any printing company should easily manage these.
The most usual kind of offset printing uses light-sensitive chemicals and photographic techniques in transferring images and typing from master copy to printing plates. In present use, master copy may be an actual photographic print and typeset text. Yet, it is more common, with the prevalence of computers and digital images, that the source material exists only as data in a digital publishing system.
Offset printing can generate a large number of prints quickly, which makes it more economical than other technologies and also more well known. That is why for bulk orders any good printing company would recommend you to go for offset printing.
This printing technology uses oil-based ink, which the water can not dissolve. The offset printing gets its name from the fact that the designs are transferred in an indirect way from the plates to the paper by use of rubber blankets as the agents.
The first step is developing the images. Film negatives were used in the past for making images and then duplicating them to aluminum based printing plates. However, a modern printing company would now develop the plates directly by using an image setting system. This plate is then put on a cylinder with the correct side up. Then the water and ink are dispersed on the image plates, in that order. While the ink gets fixed to the image, the water gets attached to that part of the plate where there is no image so that the ink does not spread beyond the image.
After being painted with the ink, the image is kept on a rubber blanket which is on a different cylinder, resulting in the image to be inverted. The image is now printed with its right side looking up by cutting sheets of papers into appropriate size and placing them on a third cylinder.
Last steps of the printing job involve things such as stapling, gluing or organizing the printed sheets in line with the instructions of the client, and any printing company should easily manage these.
The most usual kind of offset printing uses light-sensitive chemicals and photographic techniques in transferring images and typing from master copy to printing plates. In present use, master copy may be an actual photographic print and typeset text. Yet, it is more common, with the prevalence of computers and digital images, that the source material exists only as data in a digital publishing system.
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