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Saturday, 7 May 2011

Digital Printing Compares Favorably With Other Printing Techniques

By Jeremy Winters


The advancement and growth of technology over the last decade has produced a lot of technical innovations, more options and brand new capabilities to the commercial printers of the present. Along with this new increase of technology there's always a bit of confusion attached. A knowledge of exactly where digital printing has come from, the advantages it offers currently and how it measures up to various other methods of printing, is vital in making the appropriate decision when it's time to click on that print button.

Right now, the most common high volume commercial printing technology is offset lithography. In offset printing, the image that is being printed is first burned onto a plate and is then copied (or offset) from the plate, onto a rubber blanket, and then ultimately onto the printing surface. The whole lithographic process works because of the properties of oil and water and the way they interact with each other.

The image that's getting printed gets the ink from the ink rollers, while the non-print sections get a thin film of water, making it possible for these sections to stay ink-free. When using offset lithography you get a good, clean image but there are plenty of mechanical actions which are required to get the final product and that can be tedious.

Digital printing eliminates much of these mechanical steps which are essential for traditional printing, including creating the films and color proofs, putting the pieces together and making plates. This results in a really efficient process in regards to printing. It additionally enables each and every print to be exactly identical as the printer does not have to balance the flow of ink and water in the press run.

There are plenty of advantages that digital printing has over the competition and it is all based around the simple fact that it is a lot more practical and accessible for everyday printing. It is less expensive, lower volume printing but even though each piece could cost a little more then offset printing, when setup expenses are introduced also, printing digitally provides a substantially lower cost for each unit for really small runs. Another advantage is the variable data printing ability, which is a form of customizable printing where employing details from an external file or database makes it possible for text and graphics to be altered on every piece without slowing down the printing process. This type of printing is mainly used for advertising, customer relations and direct marketing and can accelerate the entire process.

With so much advancement in commercial printing it is even easier then ever to print out our favorite photographs, reports and birthday cards and the development of printing digitally is definitely the reason.




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