Pro-Printers announced today that it has installed a powerful new digital offset printing press, bring new speed, flexibility, and quality to its full-color printing capabilities. The Heidelberg Quickmaster DI, which uses waterless, automatic sheetfed platemaking technology, was installed late last month.
The new press will be unveiled at an Open House on January 17th : a session for graphic artists will be held at 1:00 pm, and a session for all others, including members of the press, at 3:00 pm.
Pro-Printers is unique in New York’s upper Hudson Valley region for this production versatility. Digital offset printing is not offered by any other commercial printers in Columbia or adjacent counties. It is a dramatic advancement over traditional lithography for handling full-color jobs. The digital offset press contains four drums, each of which is mounted automatically with one of the four CMYK colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, that are used to produce color images in offset printing. The plates are waterless, so colors are brighter and there is virtually no drying time after ink is applied to paper. Registration of colors against each other is perfect every time. And it’s fast. A job that might take two days using traditional offset lithography can be done in a few hours.
History of Lithography
Lithography was born centuries ago by artisans wanting to reproduce prints of artwork. They first inscribed the images on flat stones, which they then used as printing plates. By applying water to all non-image areas on the stone before washing it with ink, they were able to control where the ink would flow when pressed to the paper.
Offset lithography uses the same concept. For each color in the image, a separate flexible plate is prepared and then affixed to a drum in the printing press. The paper is run through the equipment, which “presses” it against the plate to transfer the image. For each color in the job, the press operator must stop the press, unload one plate and load another, before running the paper through again.
While full-color printing can be handled on traditional offset presses, you can imagine how much more labor- and time-intensive this approach is. The press operator must carefully check each new pass-through to ensure that color registration (the precision with which colors abut each other) is as close to perfect as possible. Each new pass through requires extra drying time. And the water itself has a slight dulling effect on the ink colors.
That is why forward-looking companies like Pro-Printers are investing in digital offset to handle four-color jobs efficiently.
New Website To Be Unveiled
At the January 17th Open House, Pro-Printers will also unveil its renovated Website, prepared with yhe help of Lorien Marketing and Jan Melchior Design. The new site features more information-rich resources for designers and print buyers, and a new quote request form. It can be seen at www.pro-printers.com. Infor,ation about the Open House can be obtained by calling 518-828-3278, x 104.