Offset Lithographic

By far the most common form of commercial printing. Offset Lithographic, often referred to simply as Offset, is used to produce almost all volume based printed paper materials — including brochures, magazines, newspapers, letterheads, business cards, direct mail — the list goes on. There are two main sub-categories of Offset Lithographic printing;

• Sheet Fed: Uses paper that is pre-cut into sheets that are then run through the offset printer.
  And;
• Web Fed (both heat set and cold set): uses a continual roll of paper that is fed at very high speed through the printing press.

Screen Printing

Screen Printing is employed for a variety of uses including branded apparel and signage. More recently screen printing onto paper has been superseded by wide format digital printing technologies.

Flexography

Flexography or Flexo as it is often referred to, is a form of letterpress printing that is used mainly for packaging or printing onto non-paper substrates (such as plastics, food wrapping etc) and is also used in printing reel fed labels. An alternative to Flexo is Gravure which produces a higher quality printed image, but due to the high set-up costs is usually reserved for very large print volumes.

Digital Printing

Digital Printing is fast becoming a major sector within the printing industry. As a term, Digital Printing encompasses many different types of technology from Toner based solutions such as Laser Printing to Ink based solutions such as Inkjets. Digital Printing ultimately allows for the economic printing of short run material (usually under 500-1000 units) and material which requires individualising (such as address labels feeding off a database). There are also high speed digital printing solutions such as the HP Indigo which rival Offset for both speed and image quality and are used for printing medium volume material.