A printing press is a manufacturing unit which involves various process from placing a print order to delivery of the final product. When you place an order for printing it first goes to the Design Department for designing the job, in case of already designed job it goes directly to Prepress Department for making positives (films). These positives are exposed to a metal plate and these plates are loaded to the offset machine, paper is cut to the required size, printing requires a number of make ready runs and selling up after printing the printed material is shifted to the Binding Department for binding. Depending on the job this goes through a number of process like collating pinning, punching, foldup, die cutting machine, lamination, etc., finally after finishing cut the material goes to Packing and Forwarding Department for delivery.
The time it takes to finish a job depends on the order. It can take from 1 day to a few weeks for some custom orders.
There is no minimum & maximum numbers. Depending on the job the printer will be taking 100 - 500 prints run to get the correct output, meaning, to print 1 copy or 1,00,000 copies takes the same make ready effort, for the reason, printing less than 500 copies in offset will not be economical. Larger the quantity lower the unit cost.
