Team Impression: Day 3

Today was really good. First of all I was put in the digital print room. They have 2 digital presses and they're both pretty big (although not compared to the litho machines). They are pretty high tech and they keep breaking down, apparently the repair man usually has to come out a couple of times a week. However what they can do is very impressive, they print 4 colour seperations like a litho press, rather than printing all the colours at the same time like the digital printers at college. The slower one can print about 1000 full colour double sided a3 sheets an hour and each one of those sheets could in theory be completely different. However as they were saying to me the presses are kind of working at the limit of what is technologically possible, hence the reason they keep breaking down.

Then I was moved into the plate making room, where they create the printing plates for the litho presses. They can make about 16 per hour although apparently the most advanced machines can make one every 15 seconds! They showed me how the machine works, the plates are covered in enamel and 64 lasers etch the image into it, then some kind of corrosive chemical removes the exposed enamle leaving the plate ready to be used. Its a pretty inetersting process but the lad who operates the machine said its a pretty boring job.

I then went into the litho room. This was really interesting, the lito machines a litterally massive pieces of industrial machinary. They opperate incredibly fast and incredibly accurately, I found it pretty amazing to watch. They are so much studier and better built than the digital presses and clearly much more reliable. I got the impression there's a lot of skill in opperating them from the chap who showed me how they work, its more of a craft than the digital presses were its more a case of pressing buttons.

It was a really interesting day and I felt as though I got to see more of the nuts and bolts of printing which is what I was interested in.