Abacus (Colour Printers) Ltd is proud to be a Waterless Printer

What is Waterless printing?

Waterless printing is a method of offset printing which is acknowledged as the most environmentally friendy print method. Traditionally, offset litho uses a huge amount of consumer resources such as chemicals, water and energy. Many large presses can consume hundreds of thousands of litres of water per year as part of the normal printing process. Waterless printing takes advantage of modern technology to reduce these environmental impacts. Notably, it uses computer to plate technology (CTP) and silicon plates to eliminate chemicals and water altogether. Waterless presses are in the minority at the moment. Waterless presses are noted for their high quality reproduction and the reduced paper set up waste for each job.

Waterless printing does does not use dampening solutions, which contain alcohols or petroleum-based solvents. Such solutions contain 60% volatile organic compounds, which contribute to smog. A waterless press eliminates the need for up to 1000,000 litres of water and 10,000 litres of alcohol per year consumed by a typical mid sized printer.

Less than 0.1% of the uk’s printers are waterles. Would you not be proud to use a printer like Abacus that is concerned about the environment, the health of its employees and still manages to obtain top quality printing. We have been using waterless print ing since 1998

Abacus continues our vigilance being enviromentally conscious in all our printing. We use environmentally friendly papers and our vegetable based inks both of which will be discussed in depth in later articles.

Online Designer - A web opportunity

At Abacus we appreciate the need to have a comprehensive on-line ordering and design facility to enhance our comprehensive print facility - waterless offset.

We have been working closely with an experienced design team to produce a new and exciting on-line ordering facility. We are entering the final stages of this process and hopefully in early 2009 you will see this new facility up and running and ready for you to place your orders totally on-line. Of course you will still be able to place orders in the traditional way by sending artwork and origination by post. We will continue to scan, layout and typeset clients work as before. This new on-line facility is simply another option for people who wish to work in a digital on-line environment.

The new and greatly improved on-line ordering facility will have two sections one for experts and one for beginners. Both sections will allow full ordering and payment of your print order on-line. The experts section will allow artwork created on your computer to be uploaded, the order form completed and pricing and payments finalised in a secure online payment system. This will be a quick seamless opportunity offering several pre press proofing selections.

The beginners section will offer various templates into which your images from a mobile phone, digital camera, video or created artwork can be enlarged, cropped and placed. It will also offer guidlines for text positioning, text size, choice of font styles etc.

Our exciting new and improved site is not yet complete but we hope to have it up and running in the very near future. We will post regular updates with its progress and are all very excited and looking forward to its completion.

A Beautiful Winter Morning the Lake District

On this Monday morning we are very fortunate to be placed in the Lake District. This morning is a beautiful winter morning with a bit of snow on the mountains, lovely blue skies the last of the yellow and red autumn leaves hanging on the trees.

The Christmas printing rush in full swing everybody with loads of work to meet all our pre-christmas deadlines.

The picture is taken at Coal Yeat one of the buildings in the picture is our scannning department and plate making department. This is where Danny works and scans all your originals, colour corrects them and places all the postcards and greetings cards on to plates which are brought down to Abacus

Welcome!

Welcome to the Abacus (Colour Printers) Ltd blog, this is the first post.