The invention and development of the printing press played an important role in the spread of human civilization and culture.
In 1439, Gutenberg in Germany manufactured a wooden letterpress printing press, which was a simple vertical spiral hand wrench printing press that had been used for 300 years in 1812, Koenig in Germany made the first circular flat letterpress press, in 1847, Hoy in the United States invented the rotary printing press, in 1900, it was made into a six-color rotary printing press, and in 1904, Rubell in the United States invented the offset printing press.
Before the 50s of the twentieth century, the traditional letterpress printing process dominated the printing industry, and the development of printing presses was also dominated by letterpress printing presses. However, the lead alloy letterpress printing process has the disadvantages of high labor intensity, long production cycle and environmental pollution. Since the 60s, the lithographic offset printing process with the characteristics of short cycle and high productivity began to rise and develop, and lead alloy letterpress printing was gradually replaced by lithographic offset printing. Letterpress printing, stencil printing, electrostatic printing, inkjet printing, etc., have also been developed in packaging printing and advertising printing.
The world's printing machinery has made great development since the 80s of the 20th century. Over the past 20 years, the development of printing machinery has gone through three stages:
The first stage was from the early 80s to the early 90s of the 20th century, which was the heyday of the development of offset printing technology. The pre-adjustment preparation time before printing of a four-color printing machine is generally about 2 hours. The automatic control of the printing machine mainly focuses on automatic paper setting, automatic paper delivery, automatic cleaning, automatic detection of ink color, automatic adjustment of ink volume and remote control of register. During this period, in addition to monochrome and two-component machines, almost every sheet-fed offset press manufacturer also had the manufacturing capacity of four-color machines, and most manufacturers were able to manufacture paper turning mechanisms for double-sided printing.
The second stage was from the early 90s to the end of the 20th century. In the 90s of the 20th century, marked by the sheet-fed offset printing machine, the international printing machinery design and manufacturing level has taken a big step forward. Compared with the first stage, the speed of the new generation model has been further improved, from 10,000 prints per hour to 15,000 prints per hour, and the pre-press pre-adjustment time has also been greatly shortened from about 2 hours in the first stage to about 15 minutes. The level of automation 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 machines can reach 17,000-18,000 prints per hour, but manufacturers do not strive to improve the maximum printing speed of the printing machine, but through the application of information technology, further shorten the pre-press preparation time and the time to replace the job to pursue higher production efficiency.
In terms of printing machinery automation, technologies such as networking, production integration, digital workflows, and links with management information systems (MIS) have become the focus of development. In addition to presetting, regulating and fault diagnosis of each working link of Heidelberg from paper feeding, paper feeding and paper guide, ink transfer, water transfer, plate change, registration, cleaning, drying, varnishing coating, powder spraying and paper delivery, Heidelberg's CP2000 automatic control system also has the functions of realizing the networking of all production processes of printing enterprises and the online transmission of prepress image processing data (CIP3/PPF or CIP4/JDF data). In the new century, most offset printing machine manufacturers have developed corresponding DI digital printing machines.
In addition, in order to meet people's demand for high-end color printing, 8-color group or even 10-color group multi-color group double-sided printing, additional line post-press processing function has become the development trend of various sheet-fed offset printing machines (including small offset printing machines, DI direct platemaking machines and large offset printing machines), and the technology is becoming more and more mature, this type of printing machine has begun to squeeze out a part of the market that originally belonged to web printing machines.
