Offset's Rough Road To Prominence

Offset may be the darling of today's printers, but it wasn't always. IPG has watched its progress for 50 years.

HOW PRACTICAL is offset lithography for the in-plant shop?

Twenty-five years after the defeat of letterpress, this question appeared in our March 1976 issue (then called Reproductions Review And Methods) in response to rising competition from the burgeoning copier industry.

The answer then, and now, is the same: offset is very practical for in-plants. But this wasn't always so clear.

For 50 years IPG has been covering offset lithography and bringing news of its advancements to our readers. The magazine owes both its creation and longevity to the offset industry. So as we celebrate our golden anniversary, we thought we'd take a look back at how offset has changed over the past five decades, and how those changes have brought it to where it is today.

In The Shadow Of Letterpress

Few may remember it, but offset wasn't always popular. In 1950, the state of affairs for offset lithography was unstable at best. Problems with ink and water balance had yet to be solved, dampening systems were still being perfected and platemaking was a time-consuming and expensive endeavor produced by specialty houses.

Moreover, printing in register and color correction were still major problems and "cold type," or photocomposition machines, had just been invented.

Letterpress, on the other hand, was already in the marketplace and familiar to a majority of printers. It didn't have the problems associated with offset. Although it required extensive and expensive makeready time, it remained the method of choice through the 1960s.

"Letterpress was sharp, crisp, the quality was good, everyone understood the process. It was common ground; everyone knew what was going on," recalls Bernd Blumberg, director of Printmaster marketing for Heidelberg USA. "Then when they came in with offset, there was too much water and the inks weren't right, the paper wasn't right and you couldn't get a tight register."

Gradually all that changed.

Postwar Innovation

Throughout the 1950s, one new technology after another was being introduced into the booming postwar economy. This period saw offset technology evolve, as well.

If letterpress printing still held an advantage because of its copy clarity and familiarity to printers, offset was now poised to blow it away with its superior speed and cost effectiveness. All it needed was a little help.

Beginning in 1950, three big changes rumbled down the pike to give offset that help and carry it towards its destiny. The first of those was the introduction of phototypesetting machines.

Since Gutenberg, text had been produced either by pouring molten metal into a brass letterform mold or by typing on a keyboard, which automatically cast the "hot-metal" type one line at a time.

Introduced in 1949, the Intertype Fotosetter was essentially a linecaster, but with one important difference: it didn't depend on hot-metal type. Instead the master character image was photographed.

In 1954, the second generation of phototypesetting equipment was introduced.

Using a light source and photosensitive paper, the Photon 200B drastically reduced the amount of time needed to prepare text for platemaking. More importantly it set the stage for the development of cathode-ray-tube units, which were the first generation of today's digital typesetters.

By 1956, presensitized plates and platemaking machines began to surface, and coupled with the speed and utility of "cold type" composition, print shops began to enjoy a greater measure of control over the tedious process of platemaking.

Faster and cheaper to make than metal plates, the new paper and plastic plates were the acme of simplicity and helped printers to increase their capacity to print numerous jobs quickly.

Collectively, these new technologies enabled print shops to bring some of the most expensive and time-consuming jobs in-house. Thus, print shops were able to save money and increase productivity.

Stabilizing The Press

As offset printing moved into the 1960s, the next development on the road to offset's supremacy consisted of refinements to the chemistry involved in the printing process.

Whether it was simply trying to find the proper balance of ink and water or struggling to keep plates properly moistened, adjusting inking and dampening systems required years of experience and skill.

As a result, through the 1950s and into the 1960s, operating an offset press remained too craft-oriented to supplant letterpress' ease of use and superior print quality.

"Basically, you're talking about a process that had been developed to where it worked, but the quality of the rubber blankets, the etches, the inks, all of the chemistry just wasn't there," explains Curtis Simmons, former director of Louisiana State University's Graphic Services. "With letterpress you didn't have those problems. All you had to do was transfer the ink to the paper."

To address these problems, manufacturers needed to find a way to stabilize and automate the chemistry involved in offset. The first step toward achieving this goal was the introduction of an alcohol-based fountain solution.

Introduced in 1958 by the Dahlgren brothers, this new solution not only helped keep the non-image areas of the plate desensitized for improved print quality, but also helped standardize part of the offset process.

Combined with the release of the Dahlgren's continuous dampening system in 1960, offset lithography was finally beginning to reach levels of print clarity and ease of use on par with letterpress.

By the end of the decade, offset's popularity was beginning to challenge letterpress, as achievements made in phototypesetting in the 1950s finally began to filter through the market and win new converts.

Even so, despite the obvious improvement phototypesetting represented, until the mid-1960s the high cost of purchasing one of these machines still found most print shops favoring letterpress.

Typesetting Advancements

When the first typesetters were introduced, their target market was the newspaper industry, which meant they were too big and expensive to be used effectively by most print shops.

However, as the price came down and the level of quality went up, more and more print shops were able to gamble on this "new" technology. Still, involvement was generally limited to larger commercial shops.

What really sealed offset's fate was Compugraphic's introduction of a phototypesetter priced within the reach of small to medium sized plants in the late 1960s. Combined with a new generation of smaller offset presses such as A.B.Dick's 350 and 360 series and the Addressograph-Multigraph Corp.'s 1250, small print shops could now afford to delve into the rapidly growing world of offset printing.

"I think it was the ease of use and the improved technology of the paper plates that made them so attractive," explains Paul Molfino, print director at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "So now you were able to avoid all the hassles involved in making film and the cost was lower too."

Enter Electronic Prepress

With many of the obstacles blocking offset's rise to primacy out of the way, the stage was set for offset to shake off its remaining constraints and dazzle the printing world with its flexibility. Once again, all it would take was a little help.

"I came into the business in 1971, and by that time offset was fairly well entrenched," recalls Ken Newton, A.B.Dick's senior vice president of digital systems, "but the prepress side of the business was just starting to explode, which facilitated offset's even more rapid transition."

That explosion was like the shot heard round the world. But the agent that propelled this revolutionary blast was not gunpowder but the introduction of color electronic publishing systems, or CEPS.

Developed to automate high-end color separation and display on-screen page makeup design—two of the last and most persistent problems still hectoring offset—CEPS was revolutionary because it delivered easier color production and what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) pagination.

Prior to this, printers were still separating color photographically, or sometimes even manually; and though CEPS were still unattainable for the average print shop because of their extremely high cost, this was the future of offset prepress technology.

Not to be outdone, xerography also helped push offset lithography to new heights in 1970s.

Since the introduction of the Xerox 914 in 1959, xerography had been making steady gains on offset in the area of short-run production.

With next to no makeready and extra features like collating and stapling, xerography was a faster, easier way to meet short-run production demands without all the makeready involved in offset production.

"I think what it did was force press manufacturers to keep pace with the needs of printers," explains Mel Zischler, manager of Graphic Production Services for Principal Financial Group. "Because they wanted to remain competitive they had to find a faster way to makeready."

To combat the further erosion of their niche, press manufacturers focused on making presses faster and more automated. In-line production, push-button controls and mechanically automated inking systems all became standard in the 1970s, as well as increased press speeds, all to try to limit xerography's impact.

Though offset manufacturers were never really able to claim victory over the xerographic process for short-run production, xerography did contribute mightily to the development of offset lithography and help push it towards its current state.

Automation

Despite improvements, though, operating a press was still a craft-oriented procedure. It needed to become a standardized science. It needed more automation.

"I think during the 1980s, they realized that the press had to be an absolutely repeatable science," Newton explains. "So that's when they really started doing things that would automate the process of printing."

By 1985, computers were controlling processes that were formerly regulated by humans. Processes like ink distribution and monitoring, register adjust and plate reading were now fully automated. These changes not only made craftsmanship less necessary in operating a press, but they also helped streamline the printing process.

With the introduction of computers into offset printing, presses could even detect and solve some of their own problems and prepare themselves for the next job. As a result, productivity and ease of use had never been higher.

Skipping The Film

Perhaps the most significant contribution to offset lithography at this time, was the advent of the direct-to-plate system. Page information could now be sent digitally to a platesetter, which then would read the information and expose it onto a polyester plate in register, eliminating the need for a negative.

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, presses were continually improving and becoming more automated.

Similarly, imagesetters, also introduced in the early 1980s, bypassed traditional typesetting by writing directly to paper or film by means of a laser, and were able to output color separations and high-resolution halftones.

Though it would still be a few more years until direct-to-plate systems would really come into their own, the most cumbersome aspect of offset printing had been removed.

Finally, offset had not only surpassed letterpress in terms of print quality, but now it was also faster and cheaper too.

But it was still no match for a copier for short-run work. That changed in 1991.

Direct Imaging

At the Print '91 trade show, Presstek and Heidelberg jointly unveiled the world's first direct imaging (DI) press, the GTO-DI. Using a spark discharge to burst a hole in the top of a silicone plate inside the press, this new waterless, in-line press represented the future of short-run printing. It could eliminate prepress procedures like film imagesetting, development and stripping and platemaking.

By today's standards the resolution was poor, but at the time it was comparable to the best laser copiers available, and represented a slight improvement for on-demand color, especially for short-runs.

Nevertheless, sales were slow.

In the first two years Heidelberg sold less than a 100 GTOs, and no one was sure how the market would develop. In fact, no one else was even making DI presses at the time.

"When we started this we were more or less the only player, and it was difficult to convince customers that this is going to be the technology of the future," explains Blumberg, of Heidelberg.

By 1993 spark discharge had made way for Pearl technology, a laser imaging process developed by Presstek and used on the GTO line. The next year, In-Plant Reproductions recognized Heidelberg, and other vendors, when we honored direct digital color printing as our Industry Leader of the Year.

At Drupa '95 Heidelberg took orders for over 600 DI presses, and slowly the printing industry began to take notice. Other vendors began to get involved. Omni-Adast teamed up with Presstek and released its 705 CDI series of DI presses in 1996. Four years later, at Drupa 2000, more than a dozen companies showed off their own DI solutions.

Offset Remains King

While direct imaging may eventually play a huge role in the future, currently conventional offset remains king. From the time of its discovery by Alois Senefelder in 1798, to the present, offset lithography has consistently proved itself to be the best application for a variety of printing needs.

Despite attempts by letterpress, gravure, xerography, and now directimaging, to marginalize offset lithography, offset remains the method of choice the world over for printing quality images on any number of substrates.

Perhaps its strength and durability reside in the simplicity of the method itself. But whatever the reason, it's safe to say offset lithography will be around for another 50 years.

-by Allan Martin Kemler