Digital Printing
Printing has been around for a long time … like a really really long time.
Before printing I guess we just wrote or drew by hand. Maybe you would hire a scribe to write out all your marketing flyers in the ancient times.
Then a lazy man thought this was all too much work, so he carved all the letters into blocks and put these inked blocks into a machine that pressed. Voila! The Gutenberg Printing Press was invented.
Knowledge and information could be mass produced. Everyone was much happier for awhile, until the Russians came along and invented suffering.
Around the same time suffering was discovered, we also discovered that oil and water didn’t mix. This was important as paints are oil based and water is handy and generally useful. But the problem was that we still needed to carve blocks.
It was only when film photography became mainstream that things changed very quickly. Because for the first time, instead of carving blocks, we could project an image onto a plate at the resolutions of light (the highest resolution there is).
This lead to the rise of offset lithography printing - using images shone onto four metal plates to represent CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) which could produce perfect copies of a colour image. These machines are really cool and printers were literally printing money.
Fast forward to 2025, customers and businesses no longer want large run prints and so the economics of maintaining even one offset machine no longer makes sense. All of these machines are currently being exported to India for pennies on the dollar.
Digital printing is now the number one printing method here in Australia. Digital printing presses are also a marvel of modern engineering. It shoots a laser onto a positively charged roller which attracts the negatively charged CMYK dust. Then the dust is somehow laid perfectly onto your paper and the paper is then heated at high temperature to give you images.
Digital printing press without a doubt caught up in terms of printing cost and quality. It is easier and more versatile to use, and now paper registration is also perfect.
Our Digital Printing Partners
We have a brand new Digital Printing Press from Canon. We choose Canon’s production presses because it is among the best in terms of photo quality and paper registration, so all our book covers are vibrant and the page numbers are perfectly aligned. Not only that, Canon Australia has an amazing service team with a focus on reliability and colour fidelity.
We also have access to a B2 HP Indigo, upon request, for larger sized jobs and to please architects. We also have access to an Epson Sure colour for wide format printing. It is important to printers to work together. Its a small and special industry afterall.
