State an advantage gravure has over all the other printing processes?

Answer 1

There are two, and they're both production advantages. The first is gravure is dry-trap printing. When you print process color in offset, you're laying wet ink into wet ink, and it stays wet all the way out to the delivery. If you lay down enough ink, you could get mottling, you could get "offset" (in this case, offset is bad because the ink from one sheet will transfer to the back of the sheet stacked on top of it), and in the worst case sheets could stick together. Because gravure uses a solvent-based ink that dries before the sheet reaches the next unit, none of that can happen. The second one is something the boss really likes: you can get more work out of a gravure press than you can out of any other kind. As of right now, there are two rotogravure presses on the market, and they're both huge. The Cerutti R135 prints on a 3-meter-wide web, and the Cerutti R335 prints on a 4-meter-wide web. Both presses feed paper at 16 meters per second--over 35 miles per hour! I did a little math...if the job you were just handed was a million-copy run of a 128-page magazine, you could print the whole job in a little under 21 hours.