The Process Of Offset Printing

Many significant functions in a business such as maintaining flow of information intra-company and marketing the products of the company need printing service. Hence it is helpful to know about the basic working of the commonly used printing process called offset printing.

The customers and the printers like offset printing because of its cost effectiveness for the production of large number of prints. The customers giving bulk printing orders are recommended by the printers to opt for offset printing due to this reason.

Offset printing employs oil based ink, which does not blend with water. Its name comes from the fact that in this method, images are not transferred directly from the plates to the paper but this is done using rubber blankets as a medium.

The first step is developing the images. Film negatives were used in the earlier times for making images and then duplicating them to aluminum based printing plates. This is no longer required 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. Next, the water is spread on the image plates, which is followed by the ink. The image gets the ink while the rest of the area receives a thin cover of water, which ensures that the ink does not spread beyond the images.

After being painted with the ink, the image is put on a rubber blanket which is on a different cylinder, resulting in the image to be inverted. Subsequently, sheets of paper of required proportions are put together and the rubber blankets transmit the image to the sheets on a third cylinder, where it comes out as the right side.

The task of printing is completed by the printing company by consolidating the printed sheets using staples or paste or in any other way as per the requirements of the client.