Stochastic Printing for 17 years and counting

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend in the book publishing business. He had just secured an awesome printer for a book he was working on. He waxed poetic on the fabulous quality that this printer can produce on the illustrations of his book. Naturally, I was interested.

He showed me samples and told me to look closely and I wouldn't see a dot pattern. He said, "It's this great new technology called stochastic printing!"

In his excitement, he then gave me a primer on stochastic printing. I was reluctant to burst his bubble even just a little bit, but I had to tell him that stochastic printing had been around a long time. And I was in a position to know. Lorraine Press has been printing in "awesome" stochastic for almost twenty years!

But he was right to be excited about stochastic printing. We still are! Illustrations and photographs reproduced in stochastic printing can show far more detail than when printed with the conventional screening technique. Below we have two examples of photographs with really small type. The left hand one was printed in stochastic printing here at Lorraine Press, and the right hand one was printed elsewhere in conventional.



They may look similar here (above), but when we put them under our microscope, we saw a huge difference in the tiny type. Below, the left hand photo is the stochastic sample under our microscope, and the right hand photo the conventional sample. The grey box in the stochastic sample (above) is what is enlarged below left.



There is a clear difference! If you would like to know more, you can visit our website, or you can schedule a tour. We would be glad to show you around and explain more about our printing processes. We have worked hard to become known for producing high quality, customized, or difficult pieces, and we’d love to share our experiences with you.