Printing

	OFFSET LITHO Replaced letterpress, for general printing, through the later part of the 20th century, the process involved photographing the pasted down artwork with a process camera, screens are applied to photographs to produce shades of grey through a pattern of tiny dots and in the case of colour pictures 4 negatives are made through cyan, magenta, yellow and neutral filters. The negatives were laid against a pre-sensitised sheet of aluminium and exposed to ultra violet light to give a right reading image. When placed on the offset printing press cylinder this aluminium plate holds a coating of ink in the image area and repels ink on the remainder. A different plate is needed for each colour in a multi coloured job. This system, the use of negatives and aluminium plates, was added to with the introduction of direct to plate cameras, where the image is photographed directly to the plate. This system forms the basis of instant print systems introduced in the late 1970's early 1980's. The latest advances in technology image the plate directly from computer, Starprint have invested in the latest technology and are able to image plates directly from computer files at a resolution of 3400 dots per inch with a raster dot of 2 microns. We have 2 platemaing systems, one to polyester plate the other to aluminium. The superior quality and faster plate production have reduced pre press time dramatically. Our presses are all capable of 150 line screen or higher.
	FINISHING A large part of the work we undertake is printed on cut size paper as required, the remainder, compliment slips, business cards, items with bleed, folded items and booklets are printed oversized and trimmed to size, folded, numbered or collated, folded, stapled and trimmed. We are able to undertake 95% of all work in house using Polar Guillotine, Horizon Collate, Fold Stitch and trim, Faltex folder, Socbox numberer and Rollem scoring and perforating. Die cut items are out-sourced. Laminating and encapsulating are in-house.
	A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY A Chinese person would be surprised to hear that Johannes Gutenberg in Germany invented printing approximately 550 years ago. Actually, the art of printing is much older. It was first developed in Eastern Asia, and centuries before Gutenberg’s birth around 1400 the Chinese knew the system of "movable characters". Characters on bones, bronze, ceramic and stone slabs give evidence of the use of writing in China already in the 5th millenium before Christ. Writing became reproducible in larger quantities when the Chinese succeeded in inventing paper approximately 2,200 years ago. In the beginning paper consisted largely of hemp fibers, then of silk rags or mulberry bark and similarly exotic raw materials. But it worked: Suddenly large writing surfaces were available that could be easily produced. Soon the question of reproducing the characters also arose. Chinese abrasions and simple printing of stone inscriptions on paper are considered to be early forms of printing. They enabled a direct spreading of texts. In the 2nd century AD, at about the same time when in the western world the Roman emperor Marc Aurel recorded his philosophical thought on papyrus roles and for the duplication was dependent on scribes , in China since the year 175 of our time calculation the main works of the classical Chinese literature were cut in stone slabs. Thousands of copies were made by simple printing: Moistened paper was pressed onto the inscription stones, and when brushing the paper with ink the cut characters stood out white against the blackened paper. The next level was the so-called woodblock printing in the 7th Century: Each character was cut in reverse into a piece of wood by removing all surrounding wood. These raised lines were dyed and abraded on paper, thus producing a positive print of the desired text. This method remained over centuries the primary means for printing religious and everyday books, for playing cards, calendars, paper money and pictures in China. The sophisticated Chinese administrative and education system of the Song dynasty (960 - 1269) caused a printing boom. Thus, encyclopedias, manuals and literature collections of all kinds were produced. The method of printing from wood was used in China until the end of the 19th century. But around 1040, when in Europe William the Conqueror still spent his childhood days in Normandy, a Chinese called Bi Sheng already experimented with movable, individual printing types made of ceramic. He arranged them an iron plate as whole texts and fixed them with a layer of wax and resin. These were then printed. If the characters were to be used again, one heated the iron plate until melting wax and resin released the forms again. 300 years later the first wooden characters appeared. From there it was only a small step to manufacture the individual wood characters in uniform size to be able to always assemble them in standardized blocks. Soon successful experiments were carried out with characters of copper, lead or brass. But printing with movable characters never really established itself in China until the end of the last century. The reason was obvious: While traditional printing with whole wooden plates required enormous storage space, the thousands and thousands of Chinese characters prevented a simple and above all fast composition of printing plates from movable letters. In comparison it was much simpler for Gutenberg, with 26 characters and a handful of auxiliary characters to set all words! In Asia only the Koreans reached the crucial step. They developed an alphabetical script called "Han’gul", almost at the time of Gutenberg’s invention in Germany. This script consisted initially of 28, and later 24 characters and was presented officially in Korea in the year 1444 - almost at the same time (i.e. from 1452 to 1455) that Gutenberg printed his famous bible in Mainz.