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mardi 22 décembre 2009

Offset Printing: How Does It Work?

By Kathy Martin

Printing service is used by most organizations for different reasons such as marketing and intra-company communications. Therefore, it is important to have some fundamental knowledge of how printing works, particularly offset printing, which is one of the most widely used printing techniques.

Offset printing is so popular among printing service companies and clients because for large volumes, it turns out to be cheaper than alternative methods. Hence for bulk orders any good printing company would recommend you to go for offset printing.

The ink used during offset printing has oil as the medium and does not dissolve in water. In offset printing, rubber blankets play a transitional role in copying the image on the paper, which is originally on the plate.

First step is to develop the images. When offset printing started, the images had to be developed by the use of film negatives and they were later transferred to aluminum plates. In the current times, the printers can use the image setting system for preparing the plates directly. After this, the plate is attached to a cylinder with the correct side facing upwards. Next, the water is spread on the image plates, which is followed by the ink. While the ink gets stuck 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 turned around when it is transmitted to a rubber blanket which is attached to another cylinder. The image is inverted to its correct side by transmitting the image to sheets that have been cut according to the requirement and are placed on a different cylinder.

The job of printing is finished 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.

The most usual kind of offset printing uses light-sensitive chemicals and photographic techniques in transferring images and typing from original materials to printing plates. In present use, master copy may be an actual photographic print and typeset text. However, it is more common, with the prevalence of computers and digital images, that the master copy exists only as data in a digital printing system.

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