At Color Postcards.com, we are committed to environmentally friendly printing solutions. As a veteran printing company, we understand the importance of doing everything possible for sustainability of the environment. All short run printing is done using environmentally friendly digital printing technology. All longer runs are printed with soy based ink on top quality offset equipment by the process of lithography. Additionally, our company has dedicated recycling programs in place for all make-ready and waste paper used in the process of manufacturing postcards. In this manner, you get a top quality product with the lowest possible impact on the environment. If you would like to learn more about the advantages of these two printing methods, please read the information provided below:
Digital Printing- While some forms of digital printing have been used by mail-houses for decades, the technology really took off in popularity after the advent of desktop publishing in 1985. While newspapers and some printing companies owned the components necessary to create a desktop publishing system in the early 80's, the concept gained mass appeal and acceptance with the release of the Apple 512K system, the Apple Laser-Writer printer, and a program called PageMaker. These three components created the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) system for electronic publishing. Although the Apple printer was only 300 dpi, the Adobe Postscript language used to store these fonts in the printer's ROM (random access memory), was the real start of an open market. Postscript fonts allowed anyone (with a system) to proof their work locally until they were content with their documents and then have the same documents printed on different, higher quality, printers that also used the Adobe Postscript language. By 1993, Xerox had created a 600 dpi printer that could output postscript files at a rate of 135 pages a minute. This machine, the Xerox DocuTech 135, was the start of black and white digital printing as we know it today.