Gravure Printing

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By Richard Thomas
eHow Contributing Writer

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Two major types of commercial printing technology are in use today. One of them, gravure printing, is popular for projects that involve either very high quality images, a long lifespan, large production runs, or some combination of those factors. However, it is also an expensive method of printing, which limits its commercial usefulness.

Identification

Gravure printing is a form of Intaglio printing. Intaglio printing involves etching or engraving images and words onto plates, and then using these plates for printing. After movable type, when people think of printmaking, they usually imagine Intaglio methods.

Function

The gravure process involves transferring images through the use of small, ink-filled depressions in the plate. After the excess ink has been scraped off, the paper is rolled across the plate by a rubber roller. These plates are always metal (usually copper or zinc). A version of gravure printing, called rotogravure, involves a metal cylinder instead of a flat plate, but the fundamental process of transferring images from metal to paper is almost identical.

Features

The results of the gravure printing process are sharp, high-quality images often desired in magazines that are meant to have a long shelf life and/or carry a large number of color photographs. It is also used for making postage stamps, art prints, wallpaper, and printing onto fabrics.

Size

20% of the catalogs and 15% of the newspaper inserts published in the US are done with gravure printing. A third of all magazines, and nearly all of the popular Sunday edition news magazine inserts are printed using gravure methods. It makes up 5% of the commercial printing industry.

Considerations

Despite its high quality images and the durability of its plates, gravure methods remain a costly way of producing a publication, and this limits its applications. While the pre-press costs between gravure and offset printing (offset being the other major method) are about the same, making a gravure plate costs 5 to 6 times as much as an offset plate.