A Bit of Knowledge Goes a Long Way

By Charen Smith (http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Bit-of-Knowledge-Goes-a-Long-Way&id=1391385)

Anytime you have any kind of advertisement printed out you're going to be dealing with a printing company.

Marketing and color printing go hand in hand, after all. If you make marketing material you simply need to print it, and I don't think very many companies handle that chore themselves.
Buying and learning how to use a printing press isn't the most practical solution to your printing needs, and unless you're a business so small you don't have to worry about any professional color printing, you have to accept that you're going to be working with a printing company.
Do you need any lithographic printing done, and do you even know what lithographic printing is? Maybe you need to have some offset printing for your advertisements.
The printing industry is obviously a lot more complicated than what goes into printing something off at home, and yet many companies don't really take that into consideration. 

All You Ever Wanted To Know About The Printing Press

Executive summary by Sandy Cosser

Who invented the printing press? The thing is, and it was given away a bit in the opening paragraph, Johann Gutenberg only invented a certain kind of printing press. In order to find out who invented the first printing press we have to go much further back and a little east.

It was 1040 and Bi Sheng is the person who is credited with inventing the first movable printing press. Our friend, the German engraver Gutenberg, is only third in the printing press hierarchy and he only comes along in 1440. A full 400 years after the Chinese invented their press. The new press made books that were more durable and of a higher quality than those that were previously printed. In 1812 another pair of Germans, Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer invented the Steam-powered Press. It could print over 1000 copies of a page an hour vs the 240 copies that the Gutenberg press could do. In 1833, Richard M Hoe, invented the Rotary Printing Press. This press didn’t deal with mere thousands of copies; it did millions of copies a day. Coincidentally it was called a jobbing press. It’s been quite a journey, from cruddy blocks to high tech rubber mats and oil and water.