Commercial printers and their respective companies play an enormous role in today’s modern society for businesses, artists and individuals. The magazine or newspaper that you are holding right now is the end product of the printing industry. Without them we would not have access to physical reading materials.
Consider this the next time you spend time in traffic or in the doctor’s office waiting room with nothing to read.
The Core of the Commercial Printing Industry
Many believe that all printing companies do is transfer words and thoughts onto prints and paper. While it is true that this is the essence of commercial printing, the process is much more difficult to achieve than one might think.
First, there are many different types of surfaces that can be used to embed words and images. Magazines, glossy paper, and wood are just a few and it takes a different skill to print anything on each surface. This is why the industry is vast and requires operators to have some level of technical skill to operate all the machines involved in the process.
One of the most common services offered by any printing company is offset printing. This is where the offset press begins to transfer the color from the main layout of the material onto the surface where the print is supposed to be produced. The four main cycles are magenta, yellow, black and cyan. They are used in nearly every printing solution and the process ends up creating four different color negatives, one of each color. This process of separating colors has been used since the invention of color printing and continues to be practiced even today.
Due to advances in technology, better quality printers capable of printing faster and more efficiently have been invented which reduced the amount of time it took to print stacks of paper and materials. After all the pages have run through the press, they are forwarded to another person on the line who acts as a quality checker. Their job is to check for any form of typos or errors that may have occurred somewhere in the printing process. The erroneous print is discarded and the print job must be run again.
The downside to this industry is that the process involves many different teams of people operating different machines to achieve their goal of making commercial prints. That’s why it’s up to the company to act responsibly by ensuring it is equipped with the best printers the industry has to offer as well as lots of talented individuals trained to operate the machines.
Always remember that a print job begins when a customer walks in to request a job and the truth is that it takes a lot of work from both humans and machines to produce the printed materials we see today. I use Southeast Commercial Printing for all my printing service needs.
This article was written by Rosey Manning.
