How Does Digital Printing Work?

Technology has opened up a lot of opportunities for people. Things that were once very hard and complicated to deal with have now become so easy and convenient. It paved the way for us to be able to use the internet to send mail to anyone around the world, imagine the ease it brought us compared to the very slow snail mail process we used before.

Digital technology has also invaded the printing industry and it has made things easier to handle. The best thing about this is that printing costs have gone so much cheaper because of the presence of digital printing. The process is now more affordable for you and whatever type of business you are part of. 

Digital Printing

Digital printing is the process of printing wherein your digital prints could be printed in a faster time without having to sacrifice its high quality. It has made the long and typical way of printing a shorter and a more convenient experience for you.

The Printing Flow

Digital printing has eliminated some of the long and arduous steps that a typical printing machine gives you. It lessens the printing time and at the same time it provides a more affordable printing price. If you are for faster turn around times, then you should opt for digital printing because its flow is much shorter than the one of offset printing. 

Digital printing only goes through a short process. Let us say you want your pictures printed then, what will happen is this. Once the pictures are already taken, all you have to do is transfer your pictures to the computer that is attached to the digital printer. While it is on the computer, you would already be able to make all the necessary adjustments that you would desire for your image. 

Right after this, you could now pass the image to the printer and have it printed. This may not be your long and ideal process of printing images but I tell you, digital printers are highly capable of coming up with print jobs that could easily match the quality that your conventional printers come up with.

Pros and Cons

Just like in any printing process, there are certain advantages and disadvantages that you may encounter. One advantage of digital printing is that you could explore more and maximize the colors that are available for you to use. Because offset printing only mixes and matches four colors to come up with the other colors, some of the colors may not be accurate already but with digital printing, you could always expect a precise print most especially when it comes to the colors and details. 

The disadvantage of digital printing on the other hand is that it fades faster compared to offset printing if you do not handle it well. Digital prints do not have protective coatings while the other type of printing has it. This means that the prints you do digitally are nit fully protected from the harsh elements of nature. It has no UV protection coating. 

There would seem to be no problem just as long as you maximize the use of your digital prints well. Keep in mind that if you manage it well, then it could give you good results.

How Offset Printing Works

Offset printing is a technique during which an inked image is transferred, or “offset” from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to a printing surface. Offset printing is often combined with lithographic printing, which uses the repulsion of oil and water to produce a flat image carrier. This is often referred to as offset lithography.

Offset lithography is the most common type of color printing for high-volume jobs. Now we’ll discuss in more detail how offset printing works and the advantages to using it.

Photo offset printing

This is the most common type of offset printing. Photo offset printing involves using light-sensitive chemicals and photographic procedures to offset images and text from original materials to printing plates. Original materials can be an actual print photo or a digital file. Nowadays, almost everything is printed from a digital file. It’s easier, faster and more accurate to use digital.

Each of the primary colors used in printing – cyan, magenta, yellow and black – have a separate plate.

Web offset lithography

The “web” part of web offset lithography is a paper feeding process whereby the paper is pulled from rolls into the printing press as one continuous stream, or web of paper. Each roll can weigh up to 1 ton (2,000 pounds). The paper isn’t cut until printing is done. Offset lithography can also be used with individual sheets of paper in sheet-fed presses, but web offset lithography is much quicker.

Web presses can print up to 50,000 impressions per hour. An impression is one full press sheet (38” x 22-3/4”).

How the ink gets to the paper

Remember that oil and water do not mix. The oil is the ink in this case. The ink is dispersed to the plates by a series of rollers. Then, on the press, the plates are dampened by water rollers, and then ink rollers. The rollers disperse the ink onto the plates.

The plate’s image area picks up the ink from the ink rollers and the water rollers keep the ink from transferring to the non-image areas of the plate. Each plate transfers its image to a rubber blanket that in turn transfers the image to the paper. This whole process happens with lightning speed.

With all the water and ink sloshing around, you would think there’d be a lot of smudges to clean up. Well, that’s been taken care of – by putting the paper through a gas-fired oven that reaches 350-400 degrees F, and immediately after the oven, the paper goes through large rollers that have refrigerated water in them. These chill rollers cool the paper instantly, which sets the ink on the paper.

Advantages of offset printing include:

Consistently high quality images. Offset printing makes images and lines sharper more easily than other printing methods because the rubber blanket is flexible and therefore can conform to the texture of the printing service.

Production plates can be made quickly and easily.

Longer printing plate life. The plates last longer because there is no direct contact between the plate and printing surface.

High speed and high volume printing.

Costs less the more you print. Most of the price of printing is wrapped up in the preparation of the production plates and anything else that happens before the first page is printed. Once everything is prepared, the more you print will only cost you the price of paper and ink, which is minimal compared to setup costs.

Kaye Z. Marks is an avid writer and follower of developments in color printing industry and how these improvements can benefit small to medium-scale business.

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