A Printing Machine is a complex piece of high-precision industrial equipment that is designed to produce printed material at a high rate of speed and low cost per page. Printing presses are commercially available which use several different types of printing technologies, but the most common type is called offset lithography. These presses are commonly designed in either sheet-fed configurations, which print on individual sheets of paper or other material, or web-fed configurations, which print on long webs of paper or other material, supplied on large reels. A so-called 'full size' sheet fed offset press prints on sheets that are about 700 mm x 1000 mm in size (about 28 inches x 40 inches). "Half size" and "quarter size" offset presses are also common, and these machines print on sheets that are one-half or one-quarter as large.
With so many cutting machines on the market how do you pick the right one? I have all the cutters mentioned here and have spent a month this experimenting with each of them. In order to determine which machine is best for you, first think through what kind of projects you’d like to make? Each machine its own parameters of what’s possible so its important to know what you’ll be using it for.
To start, are you doing this as a hobby or hoping to start a small business? I’ve always believed in buying new equipment that could grow with my ideas. I went shopping for a sewing machine a few years ago and settled on a floor model that had a reduced price. It came with a lot more bells and whistles then I needed or knew how to use at the time, but after a few classes, the creative possibilities with the machine and attachments were really exciting. I feel the same way about digital cutters.
