SIC 2759 Commercial Printing, Not Elsewhere Classified
SIC 2759
This industry classification is comprised of diverse establishments involved in commercial or custom-job printing not categorized elsewhere. Examples of products include newspapers and periodicals printed on behalf of publishers, engraved announcements, circulars, maps, tags and labels, directories, stock certificates, and currency. Procedures include screen printing, flexography, letterpress, digital printing, embossing, engraving, debossing, and thermography on substrates such as paper or plastic, but not textile. For information on commercial lithographic printing, see SIC 2752. For commercial gravure printing, see SIC 2754.
323112
Commercial Flexograph Printing
323113
Commercial Screen Printing
323114
Quick Printing
323115
Digital Printing
323119
Other Commercial Printing
In 2001, shipments for the other commercial printing industry totaled $3.3 billion. Nearly 35,200 people were employed in the industry in 2000; of this total, 24,234 were production workers earning an average hourly wage of $13.29.
General job letterpress printing accounted for the largest share of this industry with shipments of $896.2 million in 2001. This sector was followed by label and wrapper letterpress printing with shipments of $596 million in 2001. A great deal of excitement was generated in the late 1990s by an emerging technology that relied solely on an electrochemical reaction to produce an image. This dynamic plateless and filmless process still had no firm nomenclature in early 1997, but one of the developing companies, Elcorsy Technology of Montreal, registered the name "elcography." Images could be changed or manipulated in real-time, while the press was still running. A memory buffer in the system allowed another job to be "moved into line" while the press was still printing a previous piece. The transition from job to job was accomplished seamlessly, with no need to recalibrate the press. Elcorsy sold its first elcography press, dubbed the ELCO 400, in 2001.
Letterpress and flexography are two common relief-printing methods. In relief printing, plates are cast or engraved to produce a raised image. The image is transferred by applying ink to the plate's surface and pressing it against paper or other substrates. Letterpress and flexographic technologies are similar, except that letterpress plates are made from metal and flexographic plates are made from rubber or photopolymer materials. As a result of its different plate composition, flexographic processes require special inks to avoid plate damage.
Screen printing (sometimes called porous printing or silk screening) employs a screen stencil. The image area is left open and nonimage areas are sealed using a substance called "resist." Ink is applied to the screen and forced through its mesh onto paper or other substrates such as glass, plastics, and metal (including highway signs). Screen printing is commonly used for limited quantity outdoor posters such as billboards and point-of-purchase advertising displays. Screen printing is unique in that it allows printing onto uneven, oddly shaped, or extremely large substrates.
Thermography, also called raised printing, is used primarily for business cards, social invitations, and stationery. The raised effect is achieved by applying a colorless resin powder to the wet ink. The powder then assumes the color of the underlying ink and, when heated, it bubbles and bonds to the paper. Some printers use pearlescent and glitter powders to create special effects.
Human interest in making multiple copies of art and documents dates back many centuries. The Chinese, credited with the invention of paper, designed a kind of wooden movable type based on Chinese characters. Modern print methods, however, trace their beginnings back to the early 1400s when Johannes Gutenberg, a German publisher, developed movable metal type based on alphabetic characters. Gutenberg created molds for individual letters and cast them using a metal alloy made of lead, antimony, and tin. He hand assembled text, letter by letter, from pieces of type which were kept in a special...
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