Printing services
All printing works are preceded by an adjustment process – this is the adjustment of the equipment to achieve the desired print quality, adjusting paper, installing plates (if the type of printing requires it). This process, depending on the type of printing, also requires a certain amount of materials and lasts for a certain amount of time.
Offset printing – a method of indirect flat printing, in which ink from the printing plate is transferred to paper through an intermediary offset cylinder. The most common type of production for printed products. The technology of offset printing enables printing in one, two, three, four (full color), five and more colors, where three standard colors (CMYK) and pantone colors (inks with a ready-mixed special color) are used. Also, with this method of printing, it is possible to apply a protective coating, which is used for additional protection of ink coating and as a basis for the processing of silkscreen printing and spot UV coating. On some offset printing equipment, you can also perform full UV coating and spot hybrid UV coating (with preliminary conversion of the equipment). Used for the print run of 100 copies (starting from even 50 copies sometimes).
Is part of the process of producing printed advertising products, labels, packaging and book products.
Equipment for this printing has different formats, different configurations and different productive capacity: from A3 format to B0 format, and with number of ink sections from 1 and up to 10 with the capacity to add different coated sections.
The adjustment for printing order can take from 15 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the specification and the complexity of the printing.
Digital printing – is mostly printing on printers. It can be colored (according to CMYK) and black- and-white. It is divided into inkjet and laser printing. It is used for high-quality printing for the print runs of up to 250 copies.
It does not require the production of printing plates and adjustment of equipment and is a good solution for instant printing, with the turnaround time starting from 5 minutes.
Screen printing (silk-screen printing or serigraphy) is printing through a plate that is executed on a special mesh. The copy print is created by pushing the ink through the printing elements of the plate onto the printed stock during the movement of the squeegee on a plate. Screen printing is fundamentally different from other printing techniques.
Advantages of Screen Printing:
– high coverage. Since the ink falls on the material not from the rollers, but from flat plates, and the mesh itself has a certain thickness, the layer of ink on the printed stock is extremely thick. This allows you to print any image, including images on transparency film sheets, without the effect of a “transparent picture”;
– ink texture. Many projects that use screen printing have a characteristic that is unattainable for the rest of the printing techniques – a thick ink layer, which can be literally felt by touching it. The ink layer can go as high as 0.5 mm;
– special types of ink. For screen printing, besides the main, mostly acrylic inks, there is a large number of special types of ink: scented ink, thermal ink, fluorescent inks- those that glow in a certain spectrum.
The most common methods of using the technique: business cards (promotional), postcards (promotional), printing on self-adhesive paper, plastic, souvenirs, fabrics with a small area coverage, printing on dark-colored material (ink does not mix with the material), scratch-coating etc.
On a separate note, we would like to highlight spot UV coating, because it is a technique of screen printing.
Beneficial for small print runs. A rather labor intensive and slow process.