The five main types of printing are:

Relief- Letterpress, Block printing, Flexography (foil blocking)

Planographic (flat plate printing)- Lithography & offset lithography

Intaglio (etching) – Gravure, Screen Printing

Xenography (dry printing)- Photocopying, Laser printing, commercial digital printing

Please note that while it is good to know what these are, not all are required for
the AQA syllabus.

Modern Printing Methods explained.

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Advantages of offset lithography:
• Prints 4 colours onto flat materials
• It is a high quality process
• Very economical on medium to large production runs 500 - 500,000
• It is a fast process – speeds of up to 50,000 presses per hour can be acheived on
a web – fed press!

Disadvantages of offset lithography

• Less economic than rotogravure and flexography on high volume printing
1,000,000+
• Less economic than digital printing on small to medium runs 50 -100,000(although
quality is slightly higher)
• Limited to the type of materials it can print onto – the surface must be flat. Litho
would not be accurate enough for newspaper print.

Modern Printing Methods explained.

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The main application of gravure covers a wide range of commercial products.
Gravure is especially suited to work in the four colour process on relatively
cheap papers in quantities over 250,000. The reason being the expense of the
original printing plates which can each run into thousands of pounds.

Example applications include

• magazines
• mail-order
• catalogues
• Board packaging products such as folding box cartons for food and cigarette
industries, also printed video cases.
• Flexible packaging such as printed cellophane and polythene used in food
wrapping, display and production.

Modern Printing Methods explained.

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Advantages of Gravure:

• It can be used for the highest quality reproductions

• It uses lower grade, lighter paper than lithography
• High speed usually 6000-10,000 prints per hour
• Automatic registration.

Disadvantages of gravure
• Initial cost of rotogravure plates extremely high therefore it is only economic for
very high print runs

• Colour correction is difficult

Modern Printing Methods explained.

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 Silk Screen Printing
Screen Printing is unlike any other process as it uses a stencil through which ink is
pushed. The process involves forcing ink through a fine mesh (screen) which helps to
spread the ink evenly.

•Its easy to use, versatile and requires low

capital investment.

•Relatively cheap – on short and medium print

runs – automated presses which can print,
varnish or gum up to 6000 per hour.

•Most importantly it can print onto curved and

uneven surfaces

Modern Printing Methods explained.

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 Full Colour Printing
For printing, and image is separated into its
colours Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black
(CMYK).
Each colour is printed over the other as the
paper (or substrate) moves through the
presses. Each colour has its own press.

Cyan magenta yellow black

For the original go to

micro.magnet.fsu.edu/.../primarycolors/
colorseparation/

Modern Printing Methods explained.

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 Quality Control
The two main quality checks are:
•Registration
•Colour Density

Registration can be checked by either eye or

automatically and are used to check that the 4
processes are aligned properly on the substrate.
Images out of alignment can appear blurred.
Registration marks at about 10X magnification

Colour density is checked using a Densitometer,

which is a hand held device that measures the
density of colour.

The densitometer is held over the colour bar (one

colour for each of the process colours and
greyscale.

A colour density bar

Modern Printing Methods explained.

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 Binding
Once printed the next stage is the binding of the product. The bindery is where the
printed product is completed. The huge rolls of now-printed paper are cut and put
together so that pages fall in the correct order. Pages are also bound together by,
staples or glue, in this step of the process.
A machine called a stitcher takes the folded printed paper (called press signatures)
and collates them together.

The final components in the stitcher machine are the knives which trim the paper to its final delivered size.

A sticher machine Paper being cropped manually

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 Cutting and Folding (creasing)
Most cartons (packages, boxes) require cut outs and creases in order for them to be
assembled. The machine tool used on modern presses is the die cutter.

Modern Printing Methods explained.

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