1-bit audio printing at the University of Applied Arts Vienna

Today, we visited the gravure printing workshop at the Institute for Graphics and Printmaking at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The staff around Veronika Steiner and Attila Piller showed us their printing procedure and the possibilities in terms of materials, size and achievable resolution.
Obviously, one of the important limiting factors is the quality of the rasterization which is usually done with a laser printer on transparent film. This film is used to expose the polymer printing plate with ultraviolet light. The non-exposed parts of the plate are washed away, making room for the print color.

On our quest for maximum resolution of the photomaster, we also visited Josef Schauer-Schmidinger at the workshop for Digital Photography. Although they specialize in digital photography, we will have the possibility to reproduce large-scale high-resolution ink prints (160 cm width) onto 8″x10″ film with an analog Sinar camera, once their darkroom is installed in a few weeks. The target resolution should be more than 2400 dpi.