Different Methods of Printing

Once your project is done with the content, you would like it to be printed well so that the matter would be conveyed well. There are many ways through which you can get your project’s hard copy printed in the most idealistic way. This article would help you to discover the different types of the printing methods like the digital printing, flexography, letter press, rotogravure, offset printing and screen printing. However I would be dealing with the most popular methods of digital printing and the flexography.

Digital printing: Transfer of a document through a device accepting text and graphic output is referred to as digital printing. With its growing popularity, this method of printing has almost replaced flexography. There has been a great change in the quality of the printing output and thus the printing industry has achieved higher standards in a much lesser time with the advent of digital printing.

Some of the merits derived from the usage of digital printing are as follows:

• When you are printing with other methods and incase you are intending to print the several impressions of the same thing on the paper, then the same impressions would be available on the paper. But with the digital printing each impression appearing on the paper is different from the other impression.

• There is not much absorption of the printing ink in the paper, thus facilitating good quality production of output.

• The setting up of the paper in the printer takes much lesser time and even in the set up of the chemicals.

Some of the widely used printing technologies used in digital printing are:

• Line printing: In this form of printing the preformatted characters are printed on to the paper in lines

• Daisy wheel: In this form each letter is endorsed independently.

• Dot matrix: A highly economical method that print the characters with the help of closely embedded dots

• Heat transfer: In this method, the printing fibers are printed with dyes, the design are embedded to the fabric by means of pre printed fabric paper through heat contact. This embedding through heat contact produces results of best quality and the images in particular produced through this method are crystal clear.

• Laser: This method produces the output by way of a toner which has polymer containing the pigments of different colors, hence deriving the printed result of great quality.

FLEXOGRAPHY

Flexography, another widely used method also known as Flexo, Flexo graphic printing and surface printing. Flexographic printing is widely used for the printing on packaging materials. A Flexographic print is derived from the creation of an image in a 3D model made out of rubber or polymer material. A substantial amount of ink is added to the printing plate. The printing surface revolves around the print substrate thus transferring the ink. This is a more preferable method than lithography as it offers better varieties in the colors of inks as well as the substrates on which it can be used. The flexography inks dry quickly because of their low viscosity. Quick production ensures cheaper cost of printing.