Changing print needs
Printing is needed, no one has doubts about it, but are they just as necessary as 20 years ago? This is a debatable issue, but certainly the market needs and consumer demand have changed a bit.
The production of marketing materials increased significantly - leaflets, banners, promotional leaflets, and advertisements - and decreased the production of books and magazines, mainly due to the popularization of the Internet. Will we wait for the times when printers, DTP operators and printing house owners will have to look for a new job?
Wikipedia about laser printing
Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process. It produces high-quality text and graphics (and moderate-quality photographs) by repeatedly passing a laser beam back and forth over a negatively charged cylinder called a "drum" to define a differentially charged image.1 The drum then selectively collects electrically charged powdered ink (toner), and transfers the image to paper, which is then heated in order to permanently fuse the text, imagery, or both. As with digital photocopiers, laser printers employ a xerographic printing process. However, laser printing differs from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced by the direct scanning of the medium across the printer's photoreceptor. This enables laser printing to copy images more quickly than most photocopiers.
Źródło: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printing
Most common type of printing
Offset printing is the most popular type of printing in today's printing industry. It is true that it has many varieties and uses different techniques and materials (paint, paper). The main division is cold printing, where the paint is fixed by soaking into paper. While the 'hot' offset where the printed paper web passes through the drying tunnel.
The classic offset (water) is associated with the use of water rollers and hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces, however, this method is already abandoned due to the difficulty in obtaining a good balance of water and oil paint.
The successor of this method is anhydrous offset printing where silicone molds are used instead of water.