Unit 30 D1 corrections

The ongoing developments in printing and output techniques have affected the creation of graphics. The 4 printing/ output techniques i am going to look at are:

1. Vinyl cutters and laser cutters for signage

2. inkjet & wide formatting printing for bitmap displays and posters

3. laser printing for leaflets and flyers

4. 3D printing

1. One of the advances in vinyl cutting is that you used to have to cut out of coloured vinyl, but now you can print onto white vinyl for example before if you wanted letters on the side of a van a different colour you would have had to buy different coloured vinyl but now you can print the design onto the vinyl and cut it out, this means that the process is cheaper. Another advance is vehicle wrapping, vehicle wrapping is when you get one image print it onto vinyl and wrap it round the vehicle, this is cheap and easy to remove if you want to change the design and an good example of this being used is the Sky vehicle. This has affected the creation of graphics by making it easier to put graphics onto a vehicle for advertising, and it is cheaper as you dont have to buy different coloured vinyl. Vinyl cutter have to have the graphic in a certain format, they have to be a Vector image as the vinyl cutter can only cut outlines and not pixels, so anything you design has to converted into a vector image. 

2. The main advance in wide format printing is that you can now print on up to 50mm thick material. You can also print onto large material to make a poster or display. This means that it is easier to make display boards. A limitation is that to print something big you would have to design the graphic big so that it does not get distorted when enlarged to be printed. The graphic you create will have to be big and the will take up a lot of storage. A wide format printer prints best from a vector image as it has a small file size and does not lose quality when resized. 

3. Laser printing has advanced because you can now print to the edge of the page whereas before there would be a white border around what you have printed. Duplex printing is another advance because you can print onto both sides of a bit of paper without having to take the paper out and putting it in the other way round. You can also print onto card to make business cards and then laminate them so that they last longer and the ink does not run. Laser printers print from PDF files and other similar files as they can be read from any computer and laser printers are common now, it is easier for the printer to read a common file format. 

4. 3D printing has allowed us to print 3D objects out of plastic. 3D printing was available in the 1980's but only for specific products but over the years it has become more common and cheaper to do. A product is designed using CAD and a 3D design software and is then sent to a 3D printer which prints the product onto layers which are stuck together to create a 3D product. A limitation of 3D printing is that you will need a 3D design program and this is expensive and would take a long time to learn how to use to a good standard. 

This is a 3D printer. One of the specialist software's available to design and print 3D is CAD.