The Working Of An Offset Printer
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010Printing service is used by most businesses for varied functions such as marketing and corporate communications. Hence, 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. Therefore good printing service providers recommend the use of offset printing for large volume of prints.
The ink used during offset printing has oil as the medium and is insoluble in water. The offset printing is so called because the designs are transmitted in an indirect way from the plates to the paper by use of rubber blankets as the agents.
The process begins by preparing the designs. Film negatives were used in the past for making images and then copying them to aluminum based printing plates. This is no longer needed as the technology is available for making the plates in one step through an image setting system. The subsequent step is to attach the plate on to a cylinder in the right manner. Then the water and ink are spread on the image plates, one after another. The ink is spread over the image and to stop it from spilling, a thin layer of water is put over the remaining part of the plate.
After painting it with ink, the image is put on a rubber blanket which is on a different cylinder, resulting in the image to be inversed. After that, sheets of paper of required dimensions are put together and the rubber blankets transfer the image to the sheets on a third cylinder, where it comes out as the correct side.
The task of printing is completed by the printing company by providing the final touches to the printed sheets using staples or glue or in any other way as per the requirements of the client.
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