Printing presses and how they differ.

Printing Presses And Their Usage

There are numerous types of printing presses available today and it pays for the end user to have a better understanding of the choices of printing presses that may be used to create the work you require having done.

The reason why a knowledge of printing presses can help you, is that when requesting a quote from a printer, you can ask him about what type of printing presses he has on the floor, in order to make sure your work is being done on the most efficient and cost effective printing presses available. This way, should the printing presses being utilized not be the correct printing presses for your work, you can seek your quote elsewhere.

Using The Wrong Printing Presses

When the wrong printing presses are used, it is like trying to squeak a size 12 foot, into a size 8 shoe. The wrong printing presses can either not run the job properly, depending on bindery or other requirements, but these same incorrect printing presses, can cost you more money to run your work on, than the appropriate printing presses.

Sheet Fed Printing Presses

The size of sheet fed printing presses in use today, not including quick print, printing presses, are essentially these: 14 x 20" and commonly manufactured by Heidelberg as the GTO, or by Ryobi. 23 x 28" approx. and 26 x 40" approx. These printing presses differ in one basic thing, yield. The smallest printing presses will yield a four page signature, the mid size printing presses, up to a twelve page signature and the largest presses can do a sixteen page signature. The page size we are referring to for these printing presses is the standard letter size page.

Sheet Fed Printing Presses

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In some cases when running single sheets, such as flyers, a thrifty printer, using the largest printing presses, can even accomplish a run with 20 pages, by right angling the last four pages on the printed sheet. This is not the best solution for the bindery process, but if you had a second job running with the signature to be folded and that one was aflyer or four page brochure, you would have some additional yield on the run.

Web Printing Presses

The web press differs from the sheet fed ones, mainly by using the roll paper stock, rather than flat parent sheets. The speed of these behemoths is much faster than sheet fed, but the start up cost to run a job is much more. Therefore these machines are best used for high page counts and longer runs. These runs and page counts will differ from machine to machine, but you can figure, that a low end starting point on a "cold set" machine (no heaters and cannot run coated stock) would be about 5,000 books with at least 48 pages and on a "heat set" machine, about 10,000 with at least 64 pages. Again, this will vary amongst the different printing presses and their operators.