The History of Offset and Digital Printing

By Minuteman Press of Hartford, Manchester, Glastonbury, and Vernon

With printing, there are a couple of different types – offset and digital.

Do you know the history behind each of them?

The first lithographic offset printing press was created in England around 1875 and was designed for printing on metal. The offset cylinder was covered with specially treated cardboard that transferred the printed image from the litho stone to the surface of the metal.

About five years later, the cardboard covering of the offset cylinder was changed to rubber, which is still the most commonly used material.

The first person to use an offset press to print on paper was most likely American Ira Washington Rubel in 1903. He soon decided to build a press which printed every image from the plate to the blanket and then to the paper. Brothers Charles and Albert Harris independently observed this process at about the same time and developed an offset press for the Harris Automatic Press Company soon after.

Harris designed his offset press around a rotary letterpress machine. It used a metal plate bent around a cylinder at the top of the machine that pressed against ink and water rollers. A blanket cylinder was positioned directly below, and in contact with, the plate cylinder. The impression cylinder below pressed the paper to the blanket in order to transfer the image to the sheet. While this basic process is still used today, refinements include two-sided printing and web feeding (using rolls of paper rather than sheets).

During the 1950s, offset printing became the most popular form of commercial printing as improvements were made in plates, inks and paper, maximizing the technique’s superior production speed and plate durability.

Today, the majority of printing, including newspapers, is done by the offset process, although digital printing has greatly increased in popularity due to demand and cost advantages for low quantity runs.

The first digital printing presses came onto the market in the early 1990s.

Digital printing assembles each image from a complex set of numbers and mathematical formulas. These images are captured from a matrix of dots, called pixels, and this process is called digitising. The digitised images are then used to control the deposition of ink, toner, or exposure to electromagnetic energy to reproduce the data.

Digital printing uses a color management system, which keeps images looking the same despite where they are printed.

In 1993, the world’s first digital color printing press was launched. Immediately, it triggered a transformation in the printing world – customers were able to choose short-run, personalized, high quality print straight, from desktop.

Since the launch of the first digital printing press, the market has continued to grow steadily and in 2010, the digital print markets were valued at $85.2 billion and is forecast to account for 18 percent of all print by 2016.

It is predicted that this growth will continue into the future. Digital printing will most likely not just be used for commercial printing, but will be used for publishing and packaging. Digital presses will also become faster and be designed to handle more types of printing.