Wednesday, January 20, 2010

How Does Offset Printing Work?

By Teresita Santos

Printing service is used by most organizations for varied functions such as marketing and intra-company communications. Offset printing is the most commonly used printing technology and knowing about it is therefore helpful and important.

The clients and the printers like offset printing due to its cost effectiveness for the production of large number of prints. That is why for bulk orders any good printing company would recommend you to opt for offset printing.

This printing technique uses oil-based ink, which the water can not dissolve. In offset printing, rubber blankets act as intermediate for copying the image on the paper, which is originally on the plate.

The process begins by developing the designs. Previously the images were prepared by creating film negatives and were then transferred to printing plates made of aluminum. But, a modern printing company would now prepare the plates directly by making use of an image setting system. The next step is to transfer the plate on to a cylinder in the right manner. Next, the water is dispersed on the image plates, which is followed by the ink. While the ink gets fixed to the image, the water gets stuck to that part of the plate which has no image so that the ink does not spill beyond the image.

After painting it with ink, the image is kept on a rubber blanket which is on a different cylinder, resulting in the image to be reversed. The image is turned around to its correct side by transferring the image to sheets which have been cut according to the need and are put on a different cylinder.

Last steps of the printing job involve things such as stapling, pasting or organizing the printed sheets in line with the instructions of the client, and any printing company should easily manage these. - 16890

About the Author:

No comments: