Print Buying Direct

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – continued…

This company was bought a couple of years ago by HP and is now the HP Scitex operation. NUR maintained its independence until late in 2007, when it was also bought by HP. Another HP acquisition in 2007 was ColorSpan, maker of small to medium sized flatbed UV inkjets. The company also has a relationship with Seiko to sell the latter’s relatively low priced solvent inkjets as the Designjet 8000, 9000 and 10000.
Other companies entered the market successfully with versatile and relatively low cost solvent printers. Mimaki, Mutoh and Roland Digital Graphics are all Japanese companies that bought print heads from Epson and built them into wide ranges of solvent machines.
With the increasing pressure to cut down on ‘aggressive’ solvents based on VOCs (volatile organic compounds), these three companies in particular have pioneered the development of low solvent inks (often called eco solvents) that use less hazardous ingredients. These have a shorter outdoor life than aggressive solvents, but they are improving. Another benefit is that the print room and the print smells better too!
The needs of signage and large display print also prompted the introduction of a third major wide format technology. By using UV curable inks and strengthened feed and support tables, flatbed inkjets can also print directly onto most rigid materials. These can be anything from large sheets of foam board for exhibition panels, though aluminium Dibond panels for exterior building panels (such as building site hoardings), plus more unusual materials such as wooden doors or glass sheets.
UV flatbeds were pioneered by the UK’s Inca Digital, which got its first Eagle 44 machines to market in 2001, followed closely by Durst with its Rho series. Now there is a wide choice of machines from many companies, at all sorts of speeds and price points some with the ability to print a dense opaque white ink for backlit transparencies and dark materials. Flatbeds are generally used by the sort of companies that were previously analogue screen printers, though they are not yet a complete replacement for screen as the digital ink costs more and cannot yet handle special colours such as metallics.

New Look Website for The Printing House Website – 15th July 2009

We’ve been working hard over recent months to try create a new look and new content for our flagship brand The Printing House Website. When you find some time, please take a look and feed back to us. Some of the new content includes A Guide to Preparing Print Ready Artwork and information about our Large Format and banner printing service.

We’re a bit sad and are so excited by our new site that we’re now rebranding Print Buying Direct, Golf Club Centenary Books and School Prospectus Made Easy – so keep an eye out – we’ll email when its available on line.

Keep watching all our sites as we are continually adding new content.

To be continued…

See part one of this blog on digital printing here. Also – what does the future hold for printing – part 1

All about the new Printing House Website

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design or Leaflet Printing Check out our Banner Stands (pop up banners) only £99. Design service available.

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 13 – 21st July 2009
Wide format inkjets
The development of the wide format printer into a significant market presence has happened almost entirely within the past 20 years. Before that in the 1980s there were a handful of very low resolution spray systems developed mainly for metro station billboards and similar. More widely used were liquid toner electrostatic printers that could produce higher quality billboards and signs.
Iris Graphics produced the fist photographic quality wide format inkjet in 1988 – the 3047. This used continuous flow print heads over a spinning drunk that held sheets of paper. The quality was good enough for Iris machines to be used as the basis of the first digital fine art printers, whose results are given the somewhat pretentious name of giclee.
Scitex took over Iris and developed its technology into a successful range of digital proofing systems. DuPont used a broadly similar technology from Stork Graphics to produce the Cromlin Digital proofer. Both sold very well until around 2000 when sales overtaken by the very much cheaper drop on-demand printers from the likes of Canon, Epson and HP.
For many commercial printers their introduction to inkjet would have been through such a proofer, which could also be used for low volume, high quality ‘print for pay’ work such as posters and point of sale signs. However, these use aqueous (water based) inks that are not suitable for use outdoors.
The early 1990s onward saw the adaption of inkjets built specially for outdoor sign work, with solvent based inks that etch into plastics and are weather and sun resistant for many years.
Some of these are very large printers indeed, offering print widths between three and five metres (usually called ‘grand format’). Aqueous inkjets are rarely wider than 1.6 metres. The first signage machines were developed by relatively small companies such as Signtech and Michelangelo. NUR originally worked with Scitex on early signage machines, but Scitex soon brought the technology in-house by purchasing Idanit, another Israeli company, to form Scitex Vision.

New Look Website for The Printing House Website – 15th July 2009

We’ve been working hard over recent months to try create a new look and new content for our flagship brand The Printing House Website. When you find some time, please take a look and feed back to us. Some of the new content includes A Guide to Preparing Print Ready Artwork and information about our Large Format and banner printing service.

We’re a bit sad and are so excited by our new site that we’re now rebranding Print Buying Direct, Golf Club Centenary Books and School Prospectus Made Easy – so keep an eye out – we’ll email when its available on line.

Keep watching all our sites as we are continually adding new content.

To be continued…

See part one of this blog on digital printing here. Also – what does the future hold for printing – part 1

All about the new Printing House Website

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design or Leaflet Printing Check out our Banner Stands (pop up banners) only £99. Design service available.

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 12 – 20th July 2009
Sheetfed production inkjets
All the fast inkjets on the market so far have been reel fed, which makes construction easier but limits their appeal to printers who need to change substrates often.
At drupa 2008, Fuji and Screen both unveiled surprises in the form of sheetfed full colour inkjet prototypes. Both have offset style sheet feeders and can print on standard offset coated papers, which should attract the general commercial market. It is too soon to judge print qualtity, but the idea is that they should be a reasonable match for litho.
Fuji’s Jet Press 720 is a B2 format single pass model, likely to ship early in 2010 and is aimed at the commercial sheetfed offset sector. It has a predicted speed of 2700 sheets per hour; single sided, with variable data. It is a simplex printer with aqueous inks but Fuji says that sheets emerge dry so the reverse side can be printed immediately.
Screen’s machine is called Truepress JetSX and is a slightly smaller SRA2 format (530 x 740mm) and likely to print 1600 sheets per hour. It can likewise handle standard offset papers. However, it is closer to market than the Fuji and should reach early users during 2009.

New Look Website for The Printing House Website – 15th July 2009

We’ve been working hard over recent months to try create a new look and new content for our flagship brand The Printing House Website. When you find some time, please take a look and feed back to us. Some of the new content includes A Guide to Preparing Print Ready Artwork and information about our Large Format and banner printing service.

We’re a bit sad and are so excited by our new site that we’re now rebranding Print Buying Direct, Golf Club Centenary Books and School Prospectus Made Easy – so keep an eye out – we’ll email when its available on line.

Keep watching all our sites as we are continually adding new content.

To be continued…

See part one of this blog on digital printing here. Also – what does the future hold for printing – part 1

All about the new Printing House Website

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing

Check out our Banner Stands (pop up banners) only £99. Design service available.

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 11 – 17th July 2009
This approach is likely to become increasingly common. For instance Matti in Switzerland also builds complete print lines called JetRunnar, based on Kodak’s Versamark heads. The largest to date is a 98 cm wide machine capable of up to 152 metres per minute at 300 x 600 dpi in four colour duplex. This was custom built for direct mail printer VPrint in Belgium, and delivered in the autumn of 2008.
Dortix also uses this approach. It was originally an independent company spun off from Barco in Belgium. Agfa bought it in 2004 and by Ipex 2006 had introduced Dotrix Modular, which puts a four colour inkjet print engine onto a more or less standard reel fed flexographic press chassis, built by Edale in the UK. This allows the user to specify a hybrid system with in line flexo print and finishing components.
The past couple of years have also seen the introduction of high quality, very fast ‘narrow web’ inkjets that are aimed at the labels market, with potential in flexible packaging. These mainly use UV cured inks for use with standard label or plastic substrates.
‘Narrow we’ seems a somewhat elastic term, for while the true label machines are built to take standard label reels of five or seven inches, some are significantly wider. For instance UK based Xennia’s X-Plore 8000 has a 280 mm width, Olympus’ OP-1cd is 316 mm wide and Nilpeter/FFEI’s Caslon has a 420 mm option, whilst French Impika’s iPress 600 is 474 mm. these appear to have crossover potential into more general print applications.

New Look Website for The Printing House Website – 15th July 2009

We’ve been working hard over recent months to try create a new look and new content for our flagship brand The Printing House Website. When you find some time, please take a look and feed back to us. Some of the new content includes A Guide to Preparing Print Ready Artwork and information about our Large Format and banner printing service.

We’re a bit sad and are so excited by our new site that we’re now rebranding Print Buying Direct, Golf Club Centenary Books and School Prospectus Made Easy – so keep an eye out – we’ll email when its available on line.

Keep watching all our sites as we are continually adding new content.

To be continued…

See part one of this blog on digital printing here. Also – what does the future hold for printing – part 1

All about the new Printing House Website

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing

Check out our Banner Stands (pop up banners) only £99. Design service available.

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 6 – 9th July 2009
The past three years have seen three new Japanese manufacturers join the digital colour production club. At Ipex 2006, Canon showed its long awaited entry, imagePress C7000VP. This offers 70 A4 pages per minute. Image quality is particularly good, with near litho appearance on gloss art – previously a weak point for toners.
At the same show, Konica Minolta impresses visitors with its bizhub Pro 7500, a high quality machine that promised a lower price than the equivalent DocuColor and the Canon but also achieved high print quality thanks to new toner technology.
In January 2008, Ricoh announced its first digital colour production printer, the Pro 900 and had started shipping this by the end of the year. Ricoh’s chairman and CEO Simon Sasaki outlined an ambitious strategy to capture a large share of the production colour market by 2010.
In fact, Ricoh has been steadily growing throughout the past decade, partly be developing its own colour and monochrome MFD printers and partly by acquisitions. In 2004, it bought Hitachi Printing Solutions, a manufacturer of high volume monochrome laser engines. In 2007, it reached an agreement with IBM to Printing Systems by 2010 – in the meantime the operation has been renamed InfoPrint Solutions and run as a joint venue. Also in 2007, Ricoh bought Danka Europe, a major reseller of copiers and digital printers, and followed this in 2008 with the purchase of Ikon, an even larger company with major interests in office printers, supplies and print management.
Oce entered the digital colour market in 2001 with the highly unusual CPS700 light production printer. This is a dry toner electro photographic engine but instead of the usual four transparent process colours, which overlap on the print, it uses seven solid colours (CMYK plus red, green and blue) which don’t overlap. Using solid colours means that the colour of the underlying substrate doesn’t affect the spectral reflectance of the toner, so the colour is always consistent and also matched from machine to machine with little need for colour profiling. The 25 page per minute CPS700 was later joined by the faster CPS900 but these remain fairly rare machines.

To be continued…

See part one of this blog on digital thinking here

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 5 – 8th July 2009
Digital colour production print was so attractive that other companies wanted to build their own. In particular Xerox, which had been the biggest seller of Xeikons, announced its own in-house system, the sheetfed DocuColor 2000 series, at drupa 2000. Fast, flexible and affordable, these Docucolors soon outsold all the other digital colour press installations put together. This was fortunate for Xerox, which was going through alarming financial problems at the time as its photocopier business dried up.
The Docucolor 2000 series was built by the Fuji-Xerox alliance, but the company also had an all US project underway, which was revealed in 2001 as the high volume iGen 3, for 90 A4 pages per minute (a 110 pages per minute version followed). This shipped about a year later. Last year, the company announced iGen4 with, the same nominal top speed but with engineering improvements that should allow it to hit significantly higher monthly volumes.
Meantime Nexpress, an alliance of Kodak and Heidelberg, was coming to market with a fast sheetfed digital colour machine, the 2100, for 70 pages per minute. This was demonstrated at drupa 2000 and started reaching users 18 months later. Nexpress sold well and has further developed with faster models up to the 100 page per minute 3000 introduced in 2007.
Meanwhile, Xerox naturally lost interest in reselling Xeikons after 2000, and the DC2000 series was eating up the market for the other resellers. With sales tailing off, Xeikon hit financial troubles late in 2001, but was rescued by Punch International, a Belgian engineering company that already made many of the hardware components for the presses. With new capital Xeikon revived and by 2004 was able to launch a radical new generation high speed, high quality model called the 5000, which remains the foundation of today’s range. In 2008 it announced its fastest machine to date, the 8000.

To be continued…

See part one of this blog on digital thinking here

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 3 – 6th July 2009
Digital toner production printers
Today, electro photography is mainly used for smaller (or at least narrower) print formats up to A3+ sheets or 32 cm reels. True laser printers are restricted in width because the optics associated with the laser beam loses sharpness over anything much wider than that. However, that doesn’t apply to LED arrays or the alternative magentography and ion beam systems, so these can be wider. So, for instance, the LED based Xeikon machines can produce reel fed toner presses up to 52 cm wide.
In 1989 Canon introduced the world’s first commercial digital colour copier, the CLC-500. This ground breaking machine was the foundation of a whole new product sector and led directly to today’s colour production presses. The configuration was a colour scanner linked to a four colour laser printer that produced excellent, near contone images. Third party developers quickly realised that they could interrupt the live link from scanner to printer and feed in digital data from an external source, making a standalone digital colour printer.
Various companies produced hardware conversions over the nest couple of years, but it was EFI that was the most successful with its original Fiery Colour Server, hardware RIP with networking and very good colour management that could control the print engine directly. After a while Canon saw the potential and co-operated with EFI, in particular to offer the CLC-500 and its successors as what became known as multifunction devices or as speeds increased, light production printers.

To be continued…

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 2 – 3rd July 2009
Electro photography
Dry toner digital printers are used at all levels from desktop personal printers and copiers, to general commercial production print, to high speed reel fed systems used for transactional work, direct mail and books.
The technical term for dry toner processes is usually xerography or electrograph.
Our two decades sweep of history saw the introduction of the first practical full colour digital devices. These laid the foundations of today’s ‘production’ printers as well as the introduction of very affordable desktop ‘multifunction devices’ (MFDs) and networked mid production departmental copier-printers.
Last year (2008), saw the 70th anniversary of the invention of the process by Chester Carlson, a US scientist and patent attorney who was determined to find a simple and clean way to make copies of documents. He called the invention xerography, from the Greek words xeros (dry) and graphics (writing), to distinguish it from the wet chemical mimeograph copying processes that existed at the time. His first xerographic copy let directly to today’s vast photocopier and digital toner printer product lines. It also led to the founding of Xerox, which has been a consistent pioneer and always a major name in the development and commercial supply of copiers and, for the past three decades, has pioneered digital laser printers in particular.
Although ‘xerography’ was intended to be a generic label and can refer to any similar dry toner process, its close association with the Xerox name means that rival manufacturers tend to prefer the term ‘electrophotography’.
Until the 1970s, all such machines were photocopiers that used optical systems to reflect and project the image of the original onto the photosensitive drum, which became statically charged and was able to pick up the toner and subsequently transfer it to paper for fusing. The invention of the laser allowed the imaging process to be controlled from a computer, giving rise to the first digital laser printers. Not all digital dry toner machines are laser printers; other imaging can include LEDs and more rarely, ion beams and magnetic imagers.

To be continued…

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.

The markets tomorrow – What does the future hold for printing? – Part 7 – 30th June 2009
There are several ways to obtain power. Pressing piezoelectric materials generates electrical current, so print a button with a ‘Press here’ message. Printed batteries will incorporate the power into the pack invisibly allowing electronics to be printed with a message using elctro activated ink or smart displays. An audible warning might be triggered using printed electronics reminding you to take your medicine or throw out food that is past its use by date. Packs will be able to reach out to potential buyers saying ‘I am genuine’. ‘I am in perfect condition’, ‘I am on special offer’, or ‘Buy me!’ It may send a voucher message to your mobile phone as you walk round a supermarket; this code can be entered as you put your PIN number in to pay. There will be more interactivity when you get the product home, or have it delivered through Internet shopping. Smart labels and packaging will lead to the smart devices. The intelligent fridge, linked to an online grocery could ensure you never run out of milk and standard items. This might link to new microwaves or ovens, the chip determining the correct settings to ensure it is thoroughly cooked, and the sell by data has not been exceeded. Detergent packs could tell the dishwasher or washing machine which cycle to use to minimise energy use.
Today packs have a barcode and a ‘best before’, usually inkjet printed. This is the result of retailer pressure for a standard identifier and governmental legislation on safety. Going forward, combating the rise of counterfeit goods will create some interesting opportunities when RFID chips are incorporated. As well as identifying the product a chip could do more. So, a medicine cabinet (that will also link in to our lavatory as healthcare gets really personal) will have a reader that knows when a drug is placed in it. The packs could use passwords that can be sent to or entered onto the pack for medical packaging. Beyond this, voice and other biometric feature recognition could be incorporated into storage containers such as medicine cabinets or fridges. These passwords might trigger an electrical which could release a memory material cap locking the device.

To be continued…

See Part 6 of this blog on the future of printing.

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.

The markets tomorrow – What does the future hold for printing? – Part 6 – 29th June 2009
Getting smart
More security will be built in to many print products to help brand protection, anti-counterfeiting and to keep ahead of the copiers. Many new products will be linked to the development of RFID technologies like credit cards, smart cards, and other printed security products. Biometrics will in corporated into passports, licences, smart cards and even tickets to prove the identity of the bearer. As well as chips, printed 2D barcodes and glyphs that can be unscrambled in readers to provide a picture of the owner, with a fingerprint or even a part of a DNA code that can be easily tested.
Smart labels will be a key component in future. These incorporate an electronic capability achieved through the laying down of conductive inks, polymers or semiconducting polymers onto the surface of the paper or board. The development of printable radio frequency identification (RFID) devices will be particularly important. Other capabilities being examined include displays that offer the opportunity for constantly updateable and information. Currently silkscreen is being used to lay down the thick layers, inkjet will become more prevalent as new fluids are developed and complex capability can be laid down in a single pass. Smart electronic displays and RFID will become common in packaging.
Stora Enso has several novel concepts and demonstrations. One is for automatic opening and re-closing packaging systems with a carton formed to mimic the mechanism of a flower opening. The pack can open or close under certain conditions depending on shape memory where materials revert to previous shapes under the influence of heat, light or electricity. This could create seals that open under certain environmental conditions, e.g. when a microwaveable meal reaches the correct cooking temperature or a drinks container is suitably chilled. Linking this with reversible glue systems, requiring electricity to reverse the polarity of surfaces and effectively switch to glue on or off makes easy opening and re-closing of a pack, increasing the life of a perishable item. So, instead of wrestling with a cap or seal you just touch a printed button. Such developments will provide dramatic improvements in the open ability/ close ability of packs, an issue that is growing concern to older people. ‘Senior friendly’ packaging will be easy to open but still take child safety into account.

To be continued…

See Part 5 of this blog on the future of printing.

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.