Friday, January 8, 2010

How Does Offset Printing Work

By Cesar Tan

Many important operations in a business such as maintaining flow of information intra-company and marketing the products of the company require printing service. Hence it is helpful to learn about the basic working of the frequently used printing process called offset printing.

The customers and the printers like offset printing due to its cost effectiveness for printing of large number of prints. The customers giving big printing orders are advised by the printers to choose offset printing because of this reason.

This printing technique uses oil-based ink, which the water can not dissolve. Its so called because in this method, images are not transported directly from the plates to the paper but this is done using rubber blankets as a medium.

First step is to develop the graphics. Film negatives were employed in the earlier times for making images and then reproducing them to aluminum based printing plates. This is no longer required as the technology exists for making the plates in one go through an image setting system. After this, the plate is attached to a cylinder with the proper side facing upwards. Thereafter water, and then ink, is spread on the image plates. The ink is spread over the image and to restrict it from spilling, a thin layer of water is spread over the remaining part of the plate.

The image is then transferred from the plates to the rubber blanket spun on another cylinder, so that it is reversed. The image is inverted to its correct side by transferring the image to sheets that have been cut according to the need and are placed on a different cylinder.

Last steps of the printing job involve things such as stapling, gluing or organizing the printed sheets according to the instructions of the client, and any printing company should easily manage these.

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