Offset Printing Press Visit

Melissa and I went to visit Meridian Printing, an offset printing press in East Greenwich, RI.
http://www.meridianprinting.com/
Meridian prints mostly fine art publications.They claimed to stress quality, at least that was their sales pitch, when we asked them about printing in China, which is significantly cheaper. Quality in printing means, among other things, color control; a lot of the variations in the printing process have to do with adjusting color. This means that despite all of the automation and machinery being used, the human intervention in controlling the print colors is critical.

Here is a breakdown of their printing process:

1. Scan original artwork with best quality flatbed scanner and drum scanner; person adjusts scan, does color correction. These scans have to be approved by client.
Here's Melissa looking at the drum scanner; it's essentially
a tube that's great for scanning large scale images or painting.

The drum scan adjustment knobs. Lots of tinkering possible.

2. Plates are printed, 4 per sheet (C, M, Y, K)

The plate printers.

3. Proofs are printed on a high-quality ink-jet printer; colors approved by client.


4. Plates get printed; Meridian uses sheet feeder printers. (As opposed to web printing, which uses rolls of paper, sheet fed printing uses pre-cut sheets).

The pre-cut sheets (on the right) are grabbed by mechanical arms
and fed into the printer. (watch video below)



5. A test print is done and color is corrected yet again, trying to match the proofs. They guys use a remote-control-like object to read the color value on the prints and then adjust the saturation of the ink being




The woman's face is very red on the right print, so the magenta
ink was made less saturated; the right print is the color corrected version.

6. We watched an Ansel Adams book get printed; it uses black and spot greyscale colors.


7. The press printing the Ansel Adams book printed on one side of the sheet only; the sheets are stacked until they are about 2-3ft hight (this depends of course on the print run. The stacks are then turned over by this machine:

This used to be done manually!!(The machine's name is Toppy, by the way.)



p.s. don't stand under Toppy!

8. Once the stacks are flipped, the other side is printed. There is anther press that prints both sides at the same time; though it is used for very high print runs.

9. Once everything is printed, the stacks get cut and bound out-of house. The print work is done!


A Meridian employee fixing the machines.