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Printing is an indispensable part of advertising and marketing. With the passage of time, printing and printing methods have undergone a sea change. From the dot matrix printers to the inkjet and laser printers, there is a large variety in between that caters to various printing needs. Printers and the printing methods used depend upon the printing needs of the business. The most modern form of printing, digital printing is used for small businesses as it provides the ease of printing the materials from a computer, directly. In this method of printing, there is no need of plate or type setting and the material to be printed can be directly sent to a printer. The digital printing is very useful for small businesses that do not have a large database and can thus send customized letters and other advertising material for each consumer in the company's database. Printers used for the purpose of digital printing are referred to as direct mail printers. The direct mail printers get their database from the word processing programs that have the inbuilt capability to handle direct mail features. The printing is done by picking up each individual from the database and combining his details along with the printed matter. This way, customized material can be sent to potential customers. Another way of direct mail printing is by the use of litho printers , which are used by graphic designers and artists to portray their creativity. Litho printing, another name for planography or lithography is a concept of printing, which takes into account the fact that water and oil do not mix and therefore images are created, using this principle. The litho printers are used to print lithographic images on a flat printing surface and the concept is somewhat similar to the offset printing process. The litho printers, use a metal plate, which has been such treated that the oil-based inks are attracted towards the image areas whereas the inks are repelled by the wet areas of the non-image areas. When the surface on which the image is to be printed comes in contact with the metal plate of the printer, the oil-based ink on the image leaves the imprint, providing the desired design. Graphic designers and artists that use computers to design and finalize all designs use the litho printers as direct mail printers. The layout of the designs are completed, edited and finalized on the computer and lastly sent as a digital image to the printer. Negatives from these images are created to be put on the plates. The plates come in contact with ink and water rollers, from which the image areas pick up the ink and the non-image areas are washed off the ink by the water. The image with the ink then gets transferred to the paper.
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