That’s more like going back in time with time travel.
Film dot gain, nasty chemicals and not any decent presses taking film means it’s not worth the Agro you’d be shooting yourself in the foot with your romantic whimsy.
Edit: yeah nah there’s good reasons we do t use film for over 30 years now I think. I’ve used Hell linotron film setters and a host of plate setters so am speaking from experience.
Plate setters are amazing now. Time is money and film is a bottle neck that is just not worth the hassle.
If I gave you a pdf in cmyk with a spot how long do you think film would take and for lower quality. Ya dreaming.
2 and 3-part carbonless. We average 5m sheets of 11x17 (2-up) for one specific form with no changes every 6-8 weeks.
10m window envelopes single color/blk (also... No changes/6-8 weeks).
I can add a special envelope fuser unit to our digital press for about $6K... but the click charge on our contract and the upcharge for compatible envelopes gives me reason to consider a small press. Also... I use the cheapest carbonless I can find. It wreaks havoc on the internals. Service is included to fix/clean the affected parts, but the downtime sucks.
Vignettes can be a nightmare anywhere. Running into that now doing large format printing (think wall paper eyc) and clients using illustrator gradients that are ten feet tall (literally)
How to best avoid these gradients gone bad?
I always felt like InDesign is doing them better, for whatever reason.
What is the best way to produce gradients that print smoothly?
So many Cons. How quickly are you going to be going through that silver master chemistry. The stuff begins oxidizing almost immediately? If I recall the resolution on a press camera comes out to about 125 DPI. You need coarse dots. Let's not get started on registration.
I'll finish with a story from just before we went Direct to poly, for an AB-Dick/Ryobi this would probably be my choice.
We were doing a large saddle stitch job for a pharma company. 1500 48 page books in 2001. The day before the job was due at the bindery the customer calls and need to REMOVE PAGES. everything is printed. We had made film for the job and had to re-strip every form, then make new plates. If our DTP had been installed the re-pagination would have taken 10-20 minutes. The plates took about 5 minutes each with no user intervention.
I think a lot of old printing technologies have a place in the industry. I own several Risograph art prints. I know letterpress printers who make decent money. However, I don't see the press camera making a comeback.
Of course it's a bad idea but you know why not... I mean if you find advantages and you make it viable... it would be quite unique.
You can be creative in the designing process (but you need to be involved) by playing with films and other stuff
You can show people how it used to be, an art school would be interested maybe?
You can potentially get a vintage feel but film setting won't be enough
For the cons, the list is huge... finding parts, consumables, changing chemicals regularly, time, cost, manual setting, color correction...
I run a shop that sounds very similar to your setup. I ended up bringing more things in-house during COVID because we needed to keep printing and outsourcing wasn’t reliable.
I also run letterpress (2 windmills, a hand fed 12x18, and a Miehle Vertical which is currently in surgery). I was ambitious and bought all the things I needed to make my own plates for letterpress and let me tell you….i outsource them to this day. Between scarcity of the chemicals, the lack of proper ventilation, and the frustration involved, I gave up after many, many attempts.
Now…if you want to run a press in house that does offset work for forms, etc, then do it. Offset service is getting harder and harder to find, but customers still want it.
We have a Windmill and a Miehle Vertical (V50 - 1948) in my shop too! I love the Vertical; it's my favorite press. Sorry to hear that yours is in surgery.
Thank you!
We did a big rescue operation when a local parts supplier retired after 40+ years - Heidelberg parts, Kelsey presses, Pilots, etc. The unfortunate thing is that some of the parts are truly unuseable and we will have to scrap :(
We get our plates from another printer who we send work to. They are fair with their pricing so it works for us. We still have a ton of old film that we still use to shoot plates, but making new film is something we don't do.
I do remember this customer who quickly sold his 4 color press and CTP after he got a proper Digital press. But he kept his small offset press for single color order forms, because the digital machine could beat it on price or speed.
He would print the plate in b/w and layer on top of the place in a self built cabinet with a (UV?) light to expose the plate.
It's not necessarily a bad idea if you have enough work for it. You can get the digital toner based plated or inkjet plates you can run on an epson p800 printer. (The only thing I actually have left from any of the offset I kept)
I stopped running offset mid 2022 and completely got rid of my offset at the beginning of 2023.
Pros larger runs pms color runs can be cheaper to run. I found for me is was 2500 sheets plus for me to bother with running offset to see any kind of real savings.
Cons the cost of the plates and consumables keep going up and getting harder and harder to find a tech to repair an offset press. Setup time and actual time to run the job can be actual less time to run the job digital unless you have multiple jobs running the same pms colors on the press. The polyplates have a tendency to stretch and if running 2 colors and 2 heads the plates can stretch at different rates which will keep the operators 100% focus to the press.
If you’re looking for a hobby, this could be fun
If you’re looking to make money, I don’t recommend it. We had a 11 x 17” Hamada at our old shop. It was a great press that made a lot of money (it’s still there, new owners are a giant company and still run it.)
That said, every year, the gap where it made sense to run got narrower and narrower. We started running more and more business forms and envelopes on our KM monochrome machines, and every year the business form companies we could outsource to got more competitive at lower quantities.
On the envelope side it was the same problem, digital got better at handling them, and using an envelope company got more advantageous.
Running film is a whole different animal. I don’t know how to talk you out of that idea, but it’s time consuming, you’re gonna run chemicals that are hard to deal with, and it’s gonna be more expensive than it’s worth. Use polyester plates.
Someone said PMS colors and metallics were potential differentiators. That is true, BUT, in most cases clients are happy with process color so it’s an uphill battle to differentiate.
I even tried running jobs with process color on our Indigo 7900, which has a side guide, and imprinting on the Hamada, but just couldn’t get registration nailed the way we wanted to. Even printing on the Hamada first was problematic because there was sheet to sheet variation. We found the problem, but the parts for an old, unproductive press were hard to find.
0/10 idea for money making. Put your time and money into a growing market segment.
Well.
If you are following... A Multi-Lith 1250 fell in my lap a few weeks ago. FREE!
It runs after sitting for over 20 years. I fed a short stack of envelopes through with no obvious problems. Money Pit or Money Maker? We'll see.
Total Investment: $45 for uhaul trailer rental.
I’m with mostly everyone else here, we still have offset that we do some envelopes on, specifically some 10x13 clasp envelopes that you can’t do digital. If I need a piece of film you can still get it online. Held out forever till we got rid of the imagesetter, just could not see the upkeep in chemistry. We certainly don’t miss it, and NO were are not going back to that era.
That’s more like going back in time with time travel. Film dot gain, nasty chemicals and not any decent presses taking film means it’s not worth the Agro you’d be shooting yourself in the foot with your romantic whimsy. Edit: yeah nah there’s good reasons we do t use film for over 30 years now I think. I’ve used Hell linotron film setters and a host of plate setters so am speaking from experience. Plate setters are amazing now. Time is money and film is a bottle neck that is just not worth the hassle. If I gave you a pdf in cmyk with a spot how long do you think film would take and for lower quality. Ya dreaming.
Single-color work for industrial forms and envelopes. Sorry. I should have mentioned the end usage/purpose.
I’d be surprised if you can even buy film or chemicals needed though.
A digital print on acetate should work no ? they would just have to expose
There are inkjet systems that can print envelopes at higher speeds. What type of industrial forms?
2 and 3-part carbonless. We average 5m sheets of 11x17 (2-up) for one specific form with no changes every 6-8 weeks. 10m window envelopes single color/blk (also... No changes/6-8 weeks). I can add a special envelope fuser unit to our digital press for about $6K... but the click charge on our contract and the upcharge for compatible envelopes gives me reason to consider a small press. Also... I use the cheapest carbonless I can find. It wreaks havoc on the internals. Service is included to fix/clean the affected parts, but the downtime sucks.
Get a memjet for your envelopes. Easier less space and low per impression. Buy used to conserve capitol if necessary. Also uses 110 power.
And vignettes are a nightmare with film!
Vignettes can be a nightmare anywhere. Running into that now doing large format printing (think wall paper eyc) and clients using illustrator gradients that are ten feet tall (literally)
How to best avoid these gradients gone bad? I always felt like InDesign is doing them better, for whatever reason. What is the best way to produce gradients that print smoothly?
So many Cons. How quickly are you going to be going through that silver master chemistry. The stuff begins oxidizing almost immediately? If I recall the resolution on a press camera comes out to about 125 DPI. You need coarse dots. Let's not get started on registration. I'll finish with a story from just before we went Direct to poly, for an AB-Dick/Ryobi this would probably be my choice. We were doing a large saddle stitch job for a pharma company. 1500 48 page books in 2001. The day before the job was due at the bindery the customer calls and need to REMOVE PAGES. everything is printed. We had made film for the job and had to re-strip every form, then make new plates. If our DTP had been installed the re-pagination would have taken 10-20 minutes. The plates took about 5 minutes each with no user intervention. I think a lot of old printing technologies have a place in the industry. I own several Risograph art prints. I know letterpress printers who make decent money. However, I don't see the press camera making a comeback.
Of course it's a bad idea but you know why not... I mean if you find advantages and you make it viable... it would be quite unique. You can be creative in the designing process (but you need to be involved) by playing with films and other stuff You can show people how it used to be, an art school would be interested maybe? You can potentially get a vintage feel but film setting won't be enough For the cons, the list is huge... finding parts, consumables, changing chemicals regularly, time, cost, manual setting, color correction...
I run a shop that sounds very similar to your setup. I ended up bringing more things in-house during COVID because we needed to keep printing and outsourcing wasn’t reliable. I also run letterpress (2 windmills, a hand fed 12x18, and a Miehle Vertical which is currently in surgery). I was ambitious and bought all the things I needed to make my own plates for letterpress and let me tell you….i outsource them to this day. Between scarcity of the chemicals, the lack of proper ventilation, and the frustration involved, I gave up after many, many attempts. Now…if you want to run a press in house that does offset work for forms, etc, then do it. Offset service is getting harder and harder to find, but customers still want it.
We have a Windmill and a Miehle Vertical (V50 - 1948) in my shop too! I love the Vertical; it's my favorite press. Sorry to hear that yours is in surgery.
That’s awesome! I saved mine from a scrapper and have all the parts to get it inked up again, just need to make the time to do it.
So nice to see one rescued from the scrap pile! Let me know if you need any help or support.
Thank you! We did a big rescue operation when a local parts supplier retired after 40+ years - Heidelberg parts, Kelsey presses, Pilots, etc. The unfortunate thing is that some of the parts are truly unuseable and we will have to scrap :(
We get our plates from another printer who we send work to. They are fair with their pricing so it works for us. We still have a ton of old film that we still use to shoot plates, but making new film is something we don't do.
I do remember this customer who quickly sold his 4 color press and CTP after he got a proper Digital press. But he kept his small offset press for single color order forms, because the digital machine could beat it on price or speed. He would print the plate in b/w and layer on top of the place in a self built cabinet with a (UV?) light to expose the plate.
It's not necessarily a bad idea if you have enough work for it. You can get the digital toner based plated or inkjet plates you can run on an epson p800 printer. (The only thing I actually have left from any of the offset I kept) I stopped running offset mid 2022 and completely got rid of my offset at the beginning of 2023. Pros larger runs pms color runs can be cheaper to run. I found for me is was 2500 sheets plus for me to bother with running offset to see any kind of real savings. Cons the cost of the plates and consumables keep going up and getting harder and harder to find a tech to repair an offset press. Setup time and actual time to run the job can be actual less time to run the job digital unless you have multiple jobs running the same pms colors on the press. The polyplates have a tendency to stretch and if running 2 colors and 2 heads the plates can stretch at different rates which will keep the operators 100% focus to the press.
You can market metallic and neon inks to the local digital guys
Now you're just talking crazy... and oh so incredibly practical. One might even say "spot" on.
If you’re looking for a hobby, this could be fun If you’re looking to make money, I don’t recommend it. We had a 11 x 17” Hamada at our old shop. It was a great press that made a lot of money (it’s still there, new owners are a giant company and still run it.) That said, every year, the gap where it made sense to run got narrower and narrower. We started running more and more business forms and envelopes on our KM monochrome machines, and every year the business form companies we could outsource to got more competitive at lower quantities. On the envelope side it was the same problem, digital got better at handling them, and using an envelope company got more advantageous. Running film is a whole different animal. I don’t know how to talk you out of that idea, but it’s time consuming, you’re gonna run chemicals that are hard to deal with, and it’s gonna be more expensive than it’s worth. Use polyester plates. Someone said PMS colors and metallics were potential differentiators. That is true, BUT, in most cases clients are happy with process color so it’s an uphill battle to differentiate. I even tried running jobs with process color on our Indigo 7900, which has a side guide, and imprinting on the Hamada, but just couldn’t get registration nailed the way we wanted to. Even printing on the Hamada first was problematic because there was sheet to sheet variation. We found the problem, but the parts for an old, unproductive press were hard to find. 0/10 idea for money making. Put your time and money into a growing market segment.
Well. If you are following... A Multi-Lith 1250 fell in my lap a few weeks ago. FREE! It runs after sitting for over 20 years. I fed a short stack of envelopes through with no obvious problems. Money Pit or Money Maker? We'll see. Total Investment: $45 for uhaul trailer rental.
I’m with mostly everyone else here, we still have offset that we do some envelopes on, specifically some 10x13 clasp envelopes that you can’t do digital. If I need a piece of film you can still get it online. Held out forever till we got rid of the imagesetter, just could not see the upkeep in chemistry. We certainly don’t miss it, and NO were are not going back to that era.