Thursday, January 21, 2010

Offset Printing: The Choice Of Printing Services

By Myra Santos

Many significant operations in a business such as maintaining flow of information within the company and marketing the products of the company need printing service. Therefore, it is good to have some fundamental knowledge of how printing works, especially offset printing, which is one of the most widely employed printing technologies.

Offset printing can produce a large number of prints quickly, which makes it less costlier than other technologies and also more well known. This is the reason good printing service providers suggest the use of offset printing for large volume of prints.

This printing technique uses oil-based ink, which is not soluble in water. In offset printing, rubber blankets play a transitional role in copying the image on the paper, which is to begin with on the plate.

The process starts by developing the designs. When offset printing began, the images had to be developed by the use of film negatives and they were later put on aluminum plates. In the current times, the printers can use the image setting system for preparing the plates directly. This plate is then put on a cylinder in the proper configuration. Water and ink, in that order, is spread on the image plates. While the ink gets fixed to the image, the water gets attached to that part of the plate which has no image so that the ink does not spill beyond the image.

Next, the image is inverted when it is put on to a rubber blanket which is stuck to another cylinder. The image is inverted to its correct side by transmitting the image to sheets that have been cut according to the need and are put on a different cylinder.

The work of printing is completed by the printing company by consolidating the printed sheets using staples or paste or in any other way as per the needs of the client.

About the Author:

No comments: