Waterless Printing: An Environment Friendly Technology

The vast use of technology has created a lot of problems for us and the biggest of them is the threat to our environment. Now we are trying to revive with the implementation of environment friendly technologies in various fields and applications. Waterless printing is such an environment friendly technology used in printing environment.

Waterless printing is a type of offset lithographic printing that don't require water or dampening systems used in traditional printing. This technology uses a special silicone rubber coated printing plate, special ink, and means of temperature control on press. It is less environmentally damaging than conventional lithographic printing. The use of such technologies in current printers should be encouraged

Traditional printing technologies consume vast amount of resources, such as water, chemicals and energy. Almost all the big presses need thousands liters of water annually as part of their printing requirements. Using the technological advancement, waterless printing is able to reduce these environmental impacts. This printing technology uses Computer to plate (CtP) technology and silicon plates to eliminate chemicals and water altogether. Some of the waterless printers also use vegetable-based inks and Direct Ink (DI) technology exclusively to further reduce resource use, pollution and VOCs emissions.

The traditional waterless printing use dampening solutions that contain alcohols or petroleum-based solvents. These solutions constitutes of volatile organic compounds that contribute to smog. But a waterless press don't need 100,000 liters of water and 10,000 liters of alcohol annually that is consumed by a typical mid-size printer. In that way it wouldn't contribute to environmental problems.

At present waterless presses are running in the minority but they are rapidly gaining popularity. The waterless presses are also being praised for the reduced paper set-up waste and the high quality color reproduction.

Benefits of Waterless Printing

• Strong alkaline solutions are not used at all

• Complete elimination of dampening solution containing IPA and other pollutants

• Major reduction in waste paper

• Added value in printed materials

Which one is better: CRT or LCD?

For many of us it is difficult to decide the priority between CRT monitors and LCD monitors. We often face situations where we don't know which one to choose. Both of them has their advantages and drawbacks. Now-a-days most desktop computer systems are sold with LCD monitors by default. But it will be good to know the difference and which they would be better off purchasing.

Cathode Ray Tubes (CRT)
The most obvious benefit that CRT monitors held over LCDs was their color rendering. CRT monitors have better contrast ratios and depths of colors display than LCDs. But this isn't true for all cases because many strides have been made in LCDs to narrow this gap. The color ability of CRT monitors degrade over time as the phosphors in the tube break down. CRT monitor's ability to easily scale to various resolutions is one of its important advantages. The screen can easily be adjusted to lower resolutions by adjusting the electron beam in the tube. The picture clarity remain intact.

Along with these advantages, there are disadvantages as well. The size and weight of the CRT monitors are its biggest drawbacks. A LCD monitor of same size as CRT monitor weights 80% lesser. With the increase in screen size, the difference increases too. Power consumption is the other major disadvantages. CRT monitors consumer and generate a lot more heat than the LCD monitors.

Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD)
Its biggest advantage is size and weight. Due to the lightweight LCD screens it have been possible to have larger screens. LCD screens also tend to produce less eye fatigue to the user. The CRT tube tend to cause strain on heavy computer users due to its constant light barrage and scan lines. The constant screen display of pixels along with lower intensity of the LCD monitors produces less fatigue for the user.

The main drawback of the LCD screens is their fixed or native resolution. The LCD screens are only able to display the number of pixels in its matrix and no more or less. Due to lower response times video was a problem with early LCD monitors. However many improvements have been done but still some of them have low response times.

China has the largest number of Netizens

The home of world's largest population, China, has now the most number of Netizens too. According to the figures released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), China has currently 253 million people using the net thus surging ahead of United States, which currently has 223 million Internet users.

The number of Internet users in US constitutes 71 percent of its entire population while the Chinese netizens constitutes only 19 percent of entire population. The figures itself indicates that China will hugely outnumber US in near future. CNNIC, China's official net monitoring body, told BBC, "This is the first time the number has drastically surpassed the United States, becoming the world's number one". Since last year the number of net users have shown 56 percent increase and it is predicted that it will continue to increase by around 18 percent per year.

The Internet market is booming in China and so is the Web advertising. According to the investment firm Morgan Stanley, on-line advertising market in China is growing by 60 to 70 percent a year. By the end of this year it could touch a $1.7 billion market. “The Internet market is the fastest-growing consumer market sector in China. We are still far from saturation. So the next three to five years, we’re still going to see hyper-growth in this market.”, said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley.

China’s topmost Internet companies, including Tencent, Baidu, Sina and Alibaba, are flourishing and are outperforming the China-based operations of American Internet giants like Google, Yahoo and eBay. The upcoming Beijing Olympics has partly helped the advertising sales. Riding on this wave the Chinese search engine, Baidu showed an 87 percent increase in profits in the second quarter of 2008. Baidu is currently holding a market share of 63 % in the Chinese search market. Its closest rivals, Google holds 26% of the Chinese search market, while Yahoo holds only 8 percent.

Though China tops in the race of the number of Internet users but it has yet to catch the US in terms of total revenue generated. The figures released by Analysys International states that China's Internet firms made total revenues of $5.9billion in 2007. For the same period US combined Internet revenue was around $21.2billion.