Who are we?

StarNet Digital Publishing is a female-owned printing company in Bloomington, IL that provides digital services to clients in need of flexible, high-quality output in a short time frame.

Why Digital Printing?

Digital printing is fast and flexible. By "flexible," we are referring to the many options that you have when choosing digital printing.

Smaller projects requiring only a couple hundred copies are not very economical to print by traditional methods. This is because major costs (time, film/plate creation, press make readys) are not dependent upon job size. All jobs, no matter how large or small, have to be set up and completed in the same way, which means that the prepress costs are just as great for short runs as for long ones.

With digital printing advancements, that has all changed. Now, short runs can be output at a much lower cost on a digital press, because there is a minimal setup; files are sent directly to the press, eliminating costly make readys. That means that you get high-quality pieces for a much lower price.

Another example of the flexibility that digital printing can offer can be seen in some projects that conventional presses are completely incapable of completing, such as custom printing.

Custom printing refers to digital printing that can produce variable data marketing literature by merging provided database information to the content of the digital file. With digital printing, personalized information about your potential customers can aid in customizing material that they may better relate to, going beyond the usual custom salutation line of a business letter. You may include specific information to a potential customer, such as charts, tables, etc. that they would be interested in.

General Printing Information

At StarNet, we have four machines: two presses and two printers. First we will clear up the differences between these two types of devices. The differences lie in how ink is applied to paper (or some other medium) in each machine. Simply stated, a press uses a plate to apply ink to the output medium (usually paper), while a printer uses another method, as explained further below.

In a press, a "plate" is used to carry the image. Our two presses use a technique called offset printing to get that image from the plate to the paper. This technique may be summed up in 3 steps:

1. First, Ink is applied to the plate, according to the image that the press has put on the plate.

2. Next, the plate transfers the inked image to a rubber "blanket" that will carry the image to the paper.

3. Finally, the blanket transfers the image to the paper for the final output.

In conventional presses, the plate holds one image for the entire run, and the press cannot create a new piece until a new plate is created. In digital presses (such as our Indigo) however, the plate can be changed during a single run, so that custom printing (as discussed above) is possible. For our longer runs that do not require custom (or variable) printing, we use our Heidelberg press.

Instead of using a plate as an image carrier, printers use different techniques. At StarNet, our two printers work in somewhat different ways to perform somewhat different tasks. Our Docutech is used for black and white projects, while our Hi-Fi Jet Large Format Printer is used for up to six-color output of larger dimension projects such as posters, banners, etc.

As far as how these two machines apply ink to paper, the Docutech uses toner (that is, dry ink that is electrically charged). A drum in the printer creates the image on the paper using the reverse charge of the toner, and the toner powder is attracted to the charged areas of the paper through static electricity; the ink is then permanently applied to the paper through the use of heat. The large format printer applies ink to paper in the same way as a common desktop inkjet printer; by spraying drops of ink onto the paper.