The development history of printing presses

A machine that prints text and images.Modern printing presses generally consist of mechanisms such as plate loading, ink coating, imprinting, and paper feeding (including folding).Its working principle is: first make a printing plate with the text and images to be printed, install it on the printing press, and then apply ink manually or by a printing machine to the areas with text and images on the printing plate, and then transfer it directly or indirectly. Printing onto paper or other substrates (such as textiles, metal plates, plastics, leather, wood boards, glass, and ceramics) to produce an identical print to the printing plate.The invention and development of the printing press played an important role in the spread of human civilization and culture.
The invention and development of the printing press played an important role in the spread of human civilization and culture.In 1439, Germany's Gutenberg manufactured a wooden relief printing press. Although this vertical spiral hand-operated printing press had a simple structure, it was used for 300 years; in 1812, Germany's Koenig made the first Taiyuan flattened letterpress printing press; in 1847, Hoy of the United States invented the rotary printing press; in 1900, a six-color rotary printing press was made; in 1904, Rubell of the United States invented the offset printing press.

Before the 1950s, the traditional letterpress printing process dominated the printing industry, and the development of printing presses was dominated by letterpress printing machines.However, the lead alloy letterpress printing process has the disadvantages of high labor intensity, long production cycle and environmental pollution.Since the 1960s, the lithographic offset printing process, which has the characteristics of short cycle and high productivity, has begun to rise and develop. Lead alloy letterpress printing has gradually been replaced by lithographic offset printing.Soft letterpress printing, stencil printing, electrostatic printing, inkjet printing, etc. have also been developed in packaging printing and advertising printing.The world's printing machinery has achieved great development since the 1980s.Over the past 20 years, the development of printing machinery has gone through three stages: The first stage was from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. This stage was the heyday of the development of offset printing technology. The largest sheet-fed offset printing presses during this period The printing speed is 10,000 prints/hour.The pre-adjustment preparation time before printing on a four-color printing machine is generally about 2 hours.The automatic control of the printing press mainly focuses on automatic paper knotting, automatic paper delivery, automatic cleaning, automatic detection of ink color, automatic adjustment of ink volume, and registration remote control.During this period, in addition to single-color and two-color machines, almost every sheet-fed offset printing press manufacturer also had the ability to manufacture four-color machines. Most manufacturers were able to manufacture paper turning mechanisms for double-sided printing.

The second stage is from the early 1990s to the end of the 20th century.In the 1990s, marked by sheet-fed offset printing machines, the international printing machinery design and manufacturing level took a big step forward.Compared with the first-stage model, the speed of the new-generation model has been further improved, from 10,000 prints/hour to 15,000 prints/hour, and the pre-press adjustment time has also been greatly shortened from about 2 hours in the first stage to 15 minutes. about.The automation level and production efficiency of the machine have also been greatly improved.Since entering the 21st century, printing machinery has ushered in its third stage of development.Some models of sheet-fed offset printing presses can reach 17,000-18,000 prints/hour, but manufacturers do not strive to increase the maximum printing speed of the printing press. Instead, they use information technology to further shorten prepress preparation time and replacement. Pursue higher production efficiency in terms of job time.

In terms of printing machinery automation, technologies such as networking, production integration, digital workflow, and linkage with management information systems (MIS) have become the focus of development.Heidelberg's CP2000 automatic control system not only controls every aspect of the machine from paper feeding, paper feeding and paper guiding, ink feeding, water feeding, plate changing, registration, cleaning, drying, glazing coating, powder spraying and delivery, etc. In addition to presetting, controlling and fault diagnosis of work links, it also has functions such as networking of all production processes of printing enterprises and online transmission of pre-press image processing data (CIP3/PPF or CIP4/JDF data).Entering the new century, most offset printing press manufacturers have developed corresponding DI digital printing presses.

In addition, in order to meet people's demand for high-end color prints, multi-color double-sided printing with 8 or even 10 color groups and additional online post-printing processing functions have become a popular choice for various sheet-fed offset presses (including small offset presses, DI direct plate making machine and large offset printing press), and the technology is becoming increasingly mature, this type of printing press has begun to squeeze out part of the market that originally belonged to web printing presses.

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