Put simply, digital printing is where an image is made on say, paper, using a device that constructs that image electronically and imparts it onto the ‘paper’ without any intermediate systems such as film or printing plates.

As there are no plates etc the cost of short runs are greatly reduced. With digital printing the image is freshly constructed every time it is printed, this means that every image on a run can be varied. This could be simply the name and address for a mailing, of for an advertising campaign, it could also be the product featured, allowing for a very well targeted mailing.

Well, first off, the colours on your screen don’t look like those in real life!
 

Colour matching is a bit of a minefield, but there are very good reasons for this. Whenever we view a picture on screen or print it we have to compromise.
 

Using the diagram to the right I’ll explain. The blue, green and red sections represent all the colours visible to the human eye. The green and red sections represent all the colours that a typical monitor is capable of showing and yes, the red, centre section represents the proportion of the visible spectrum that a typical colour printer can print. As you can see at best we can only print a fraction of all colours. Software exists to increase colour accuracy, making scans, screen and print resemble each other more accurately. This does not (indeed cannot) increase the proportion of printable colours, it reduces the colours that are shown on a monitor to those it is possible to print.
 

Short answer; digital printing, scan at 200dpi, litho printing, scan at 300dpi, these are for colour or black and white.

Slightly longer answer; You need to know a bit about the printing machine/method being used as it depends on the lines per inch, lpi, (not dpi), being used. As a rule of thumb, at the size the picture is going to be printed at, the image dpi should be twice the lpi. In general lithographic printing is done at either 133lpi of 150lpi, therefore if the picture is at 300dpi you’ll be OK. Some printers go to 175lpi, but 300dpi should still be OK.

Digital black and white machines work around 105lpi so 200dpi is fine for them. Digital colour machines work around 60-80lpi (this is changing as technology moves on) so 150dpi is fine. To make life easier, because the colour and black & white lpi are close, we scan all digital images at 200dpi.

Please note that these are the resolutions needed for printing at the final size, which is not necessarily the size of the original picture. If your original is 100mm x 100mm and you are printing digitally at 50mm x 50mm then you can scan at 100dpi as reducing the size increases the resolution. Conversely, if the original is 50mm x 50mm and you want to digitally print at 100mm x 100mm then you need to scan at 400dpi.

The three most popular formats are eps (encapsulated postscript file), tiff (tagged information file format) and jpg (joint photographic experts group).

JPEG’s can be made very small, but this will compromise the quality of the image. If you make JPEG’s don’t set the compression too high. Eps files tend to be larger, but can carry more information.

We are happy to accept work in the majority of popular programs, these include on the PC, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Publisher, Excel, Adobe PageMaker 6.5, Illustrator 8.0, Photoshop 5, Acrobat 4.0 and Quark Xpress 4. On the Mac, Quark Xpress 4, Adobe PageMaker 6.5, Illustrator CS, Photoshop CS, Acrobat 7.0, Indesign CS and Microsoft Office 98.

All files are converted and stored by us in Adobe Acrobat format. If you are making your own pdf files please ensure that the final resolution is high enough for printing. Using standard settings, Acrobat makes files that are fine for the screen/web but print very poorly.

The most direct route is to e-mail the files to us at:
production@impressionIT.co.uk.
Please ensure that clear instructions are contained in the message. If you run an ftp server, we are happy to download files from it. At present we do not have our own ftp server. Files can of course be sent to us via regular mail or courier. We can work with CD’s, 100MB zip disks and 1.4MB floppies.

We only get paid if we produce work that the customer is happy with. The best way to achieve this is to show as closely as possible what is going to be printed. Once the customer is happy and signs it off, we know that so long as what we produce closely resembles the proof everyone will be happy and we will be paid.

About Binding, Paper folds and Paper Sizes

Binding
 

At impression IT we concentrate on three types of binding; saddle stitching, perfect binding and mechanical binding.

Saddle stitching Very economical. The printed paper is folded and stitched (or stapled) on the spine forming a booklet. The major drawback is the limit on the number of pages it can accommodate. 32 pages is the most we recommend.

Perfect binding Professional finish. The result is like a paperback book. impression IT has invested in equipment that is ideal for short run, on demand production of perfect bound books. Up to 500 sheets of 80g paper can be bound, giving 1000 pages.

Mechanical This covers wire-o and plastic comb binding. These binding types allow the book to lay flat which can be useful for cookbooks, music books etc.

We also supply ring binders, also called presentation binders. These are very versatile, allowing easy customisation of the front and spine. Tab dividers can be used inside to separate sections. Capacity can be up to 500 sheets of 80g paper. Many customers use ring binders as it is very easy to update the contents.

Paper Folds
 

Paper Sizes