The invention and development of the printing press play an important role in the spread of human civilization and culture.
In 1439, Gutenberg, Germany, produced a wooden letterpress printing press. Although this vertical spiral hand-panel printing press has a simple structure, it has been used for 300 years; in 1812, the German Koenig was made the first Taiwan Yuan flat letterpress printing press; Hoy in the United States invented the rotary printing press in 1847; in 1900, made a six-color rotary printing press; in 1904, Rubel in the United States invented the offset printing press.
Before the 1950s, the traditional letterpress printing process occupied a dominant position in the printing industry, and the development of printing presses was also dominated by letterpress printing machines. However, the lead alloy relief printing process has the disadvantages of high labor intensity, long production cycle and environmental pollution. Beginning in the 1960s, offset offset printing processes with short cycle times and high productivity began to rise and develop, and lead alloy relief printing was gradually replaced by offset offset printing. Soft relief printing, stencil printing, electrostatic printing, inkjet printing, etc., have also developed in packaging printing and advertising printing.
The printing machinery of the world has made great progress since the 1980s. For more than 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 maximum printing speed of the sheetfed offset press during this period was 10,000 prints/hour. The pre-adjustment preparation time for a four-color printing machine before printing is generally about 2 hours. The automatic control of the printing press mainly focuses on the aspects of automatic paper-bearing, automatic paper delivery, automatic cleaning, automatic detection of ink color, automatic adjustment of ink volume, and remote control of register. In addition to single-color and two-color presses during this period, almost every single-fed offset press manufacturer also had the manufacturing capacity of four-color presses, and 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, with the sheet-fed offset printing press as the symbol, the design and manufacturing level of printing machinery in the world has taken a big step forward. Compared with the models in the first stage, the speed of the new generation models 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 the 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, but through the application of information technology to further shorten the pre-press preparation time and replacement The time of the job seeks higher production efficiency.
In the area of printing machinery automation, technologies such as networking, production integration, digital workflow, and management information system (MIS) linking have become the focus of development. Heidelberg's CP2000 automatic control system in addition to the entire machine from paper feeding, paper feeding and guiding, inking, water feeding, plate change, register, cleaning, drying, coating, powder spraying and paper delivery, etc. In addition to pre-setting, control and fault diagnosis of the work link, it also has the functions of realizing the networking of all production processes of the printing enterprise, and online transmission of prepress image processing data (CIP3/PPF or CIP4/JDF data). In 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, 8-color or even 10-color multi-color double-sided printing and additional in-line post-press processing functions have become various sheet-fed offset presses (including small offset presses, DI direct The development trend of plate making machines and large offset printing presses, and the technology is becoming more and more mature, this type of printing machine has begun to squeeze a part of the market that originally belonged to the web printing machine.
