How the Printing Service Industry Grew and Developed
- Printing dates back thousands of years, with the first records dating back to 3000 BC. Print can be defined as a mark printed onto a surface or a text or picture made by a printing process, depending on what you perceive printing to be. This process has developed to a greater level with printing service in Coimbatore today. However, you can see a chronology of how the printing business has evolved in chronological order here. We'll start with woodblock printing and work our way through the history of printing.
- Printers in Coimbatore take printing for granted these days, with almost every family owning a printer. Printing, on the other hand, used to be a large undertaking. Imagine how much longer we would have had to wait for a novel if words were etched on wooden tablets and then stamped to make them! Woodblock printing was the first famous printing process, and it originated in China. For printing, a block of wood would be meticulously carved into the required pattern, text, or design, then ink would be applied before stamping the block into the intended substrate. Woodblock printing was popular well into the 15th century, and we still use it in schools today with potato printing.
- The printing press, invented by a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg in 1439, was the next major breakthrough. Its advantages are still being used by printers in Coimbatore today. His idea was a mould with punch stamped matrices on it. As long as you applied ink to the wooden blocks each time, the matrices printed type, graphics, or whatever was in the mould. By the 1880s, this technique had been simplified by the introduction of steam printing presses, which eliminated the need to reapply ink.
- The introduction of multicolor printing with chromolithography in 1837 was a watershed point for the printing industry. Printing service in Coimbatore will have to thank this very technology for the advancements that we have today. Chromolithography uses a chemical reaction to print an image in colour, similar to lithography. Advertisements were printed using chromolithography, which took months to make but revolutionised the printing business.
- By the 1940s, printing had advanced significantly, thanks to Chester Carlson's discovery of a dry photocopying technology. In the early 1950s, the first inkjet printer appeared, which reproduced a digital image by propelling droplets of ink onto various substrates, including paper. The dye-sublimation printer for printing photographs was invented in the 1950s. It worked by transferring heat to a ribbon made up of three coloured panels and a clear topcoat layer. The solid-state dye was then turned into a gas that bonded to the print using heat.
- Inkjet printers like HP, Canon, and Epson were used to reproduce digital graphics created by computers as the 1970s approached. Printing service in Coimbatore use inkjet printers of these brands today but of an advanced generation. Gary Starkweather, an engineer, improved the initial printer in 1971 by including a laser beam. The laser beam imitates the image on the copier drum that needs to be printed.
