Catford Print Centre - For all your printing & design needs

DIGITAL or OFFSET LITHO?

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?

For many years the only way to produce colour printing for the general public was by a process called Conventional Offset Litho.

This involved separating the image to be printed into 4 special colours ; Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black and making a film of each of these colours which was then used to make 4 separate metal printing plates. Each plate had to be loaded onto the printing press and adjusted a fraction at a time to make sure that all 4 images were in perfect registration to ensure a sharp image. This could often take up to an hour. Before the printing process had even begun the customer had usually incurred costs of around £150 for the plates and make-ready time on the press.

This meant that to be cost effective the customer usually had to have several thousand copies and the idea of printing just a few hundred or even just 1 was never considered.

Nowadays, this process has become more automated and indeed we at Catford invested over £250,000 a few years ago into a new computer to polyester plate machine and an automatic plate loading 4-colour offset press which helped to bring down the cost of Conventional Offset Litho printing so that a cost effective run could now start at just 500.

However, despite this there was still a growing demand from customers who needed even shorter runs - sometime just 1 copy - and the advent of the Digital Colour Press filled this gap.

In 1998 we were one of the first printing companies in the UK to embrace digital technology and it opened up the previously unavailable world of colour printing to our small business customers.

Advantages Of Digital Printing

1. Shorter runs from just 1 copy - no plates, no make-ready time - just the cost of loading your computer file and making sure everything is technically correct.

2. Faster turn round - no need to leave printed sheets overnight before further processing (cutting, collating, folding etc.).

3. More accurate proofs - if required we can run out just 1 copy to show you before commencing the full run.

4. Lower resolution photos - although 300dpi is recommended for both Offset and Digital printing, lower resolution photos reproduce better if printed Digitally than if printed Offset.

Disadvantages Of Digital Printing

1. Expensive for longer runs.

2. Digital printing cannot reproduce fine details in photos etc. as well as offset.

3. Jobs needing exact sheet to sheet registration need to be printed by Offset Litho.

Sheet To Sheet Registration

Sheet to sheet registration is not as accurate as Offset and also as the toner needs to be cured to the sheet using a heat process this can alter the dimensions of each sheet ever so slightly especially if there is print on both sides.

Consequently, although each individual sheet will look fine, the image will be printed in a slightly different place each time so if cutting or folding is necessary it is important that no important data is close to the edge of the sheet or abuts right up to a fold. If for example, you are producing a booklet it is not possible to have an image span across two pages or for images to go right up to the spine.

Despite this for most people looking for short run affordable colour printing, DIGITAL is the way to go.