Print Buying Direct

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 1 – 2nd July 2009
What is ‘digital print’ anyway? It is a term used for whole group of technologies that don’t fit neatly into a single definition. However, a good description would be one of a number of printing processes where a marking engine applies an image to a substrate based on digital input, with no permanent intermediary such as an offset plate, raised flexographic plate, or engraved cylinder.
What is often called ‘true’ digital process generates a fresh image for very copy, so content of the print can be changed every time, a concept called variable data printing (VDP).
The need for using the word ‘true’ is that there is a grey area with DI presses – offset litho presses that have integral plate imagers. These share many of the pre-press and operating characteristics of ‘true’ digital printers, but the use of litho plates means that the image cannot be varied from copy to copy.
The most common true digital print processes over the past 20 years have been dry toner (best known as laser printers), HP Indigo’s digital offset colour process, and inkjets. All have progressed by leaps and bounds over two decades, but there is still a vast future potential for improvements in speed, productivity, quality, flexibility, consumables and running costs.

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 8 – 1st July 2009
Pack functionality can be broadened to show the ambient conditions it has been stored at since filling. Bioett has time temperatures tags that can be interrogated to ensure products such as vaccine have been stored correctly so the ‘use by’ date is replaced by a still ‘still active’ message – very important in developing regions. With the UK’s ageing populations and a stretched health service it will be more important to ensure the right medication is taken by the right person at the right time. Manufacturers can supply devices that remind patients when to take their medication and check that they do. Med-IC has an electronic compliance monitoring device that tracks medication use from any standard blister packaging without active patient input. As the patient takes a tablet from the pack, the MED-IC ECM solution uses sensor grid technology and a proprietary process of printed conductive inks that detects when the grid has been broken. When the pack is finished a radio frequency reader and monitoring software can retrieve and display patient compliance, medication diaries and pill counts that is vital in bringing new drugs to the population. If the cupboard has a connection with a toilet containing appropriate sensors routine screening of urine can be recorded, valuable for doctors and potentially spotting early changed that might be health threatening such as diabetes.
Mind what you say!
Forecasting the future is laden with danger when people remember what you said years ago. I remember Bill Gates saying ‘a 640 k memory is enough for anyone’, in 2018 you will see petabyte arrays. Horace Greely, printer and newspaperman was absolutely right, however when he said, ‘the illusion that times were better than those that are has probably pervaded all ages’. Many printers firmly believed this, if you are one you need to understand the reasons for the changes that will probably happen and develop a strategy, but there will be many successful printers then. They will be doing different things using different methods because they see what customers and end customers want and provide these services, well.

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.