Talk:Rotogravure

My 91-year old mom told me a "rotogravure", as used in the popular Irving Berlin song of her day, "Easter Parade", indicated (that your photo might be in) a sepia-toned section of an otherwise all black and white newspaper.

Japanese models
gravure seems to be a word used for pictures of Japanese models.


 * Well indeed, and you seem to be a nerd that want to relate everything to your fetish? It is about the technique not about the subject. Would you define postcards as pictures of just because that city featured on some postcards?


 * "Gravure" has multiple meanings. There's a link to the other meaning on top of the page now, so case closed.

Some images please
I was desperately looking for a wikipedia entry explaining those strange raster-dots that give this printing technique its special "look". Luckily I found some nice pages which described the process of transfering a photo to gelatin-covered carbon tissue through a raster for etching later on. Unfortunately, I can't just rip their images and put them here - so maybe I'll make some SVGs to illustrate the process.

If someone else already has some images at hand, it would be nice to have them here - especially something like this: cells and methods

References (maybe some else is better in merging them with the existing wiki-text?): The rooker 11:37, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Rotogravure
 * Gravure
 * Early printing: carbon print

Cylinder Recycling?
So what happens to the cylinders after they are used? Are they melted down? To scrap them would seem to be prohibitively expensive. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.145.251.34 (talk) 23:14, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

The rolls are made of different layers of base materials. The design itself is usually etched in the second-to-last layer, on something soft, like copper, and then the cylinders get chromed for the final layer. When the chrome wears down, it gets stripped off, and then re-chromed. The cylinders can be recycled too I believe. But this kind of printing process is really for very high-volume products. parktravelling (talk) 21:26, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Chromed
Fixed an error earlier in the month ... apparently the rolls are coated with chrome... TjoeC (talk) 18:56, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

History
The history section of the page currently contains the claim that "In the 1930s–1960s, newspapers published relatively few photographs…" I would ask relative to what?

Many major american newspapers ran photographs on the front page before even 1910. By the mid 1910s many had sunday sections that contained photos (and text) on nearly every page. An example would be the Washington Evening Star, December 27, 1914, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1914-12-27/ed-1. This issue had 70 total pages and photos on at least half of them. By 1919 (if not earlier) the same paper had a section specifically referred to as a rotogravure supplement, 8 pages, photo dense, no text other than captions: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1919-09-28/ed-1/seq-81, pages 81 through 88. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DiffuseGoose (talk • contribs) 14:53, 3 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Relatively few compared to now, I'd suggest. The Sunday supplements were special because they contained.....a lot of photographs.  Perhaps it would be better phrased something like  "....newspapers, apart from their special supplements, contained relatively few photographs."
 * Gravuritas (talk) 15:30, 3 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Grav. The time frame is also wrong.  It makes it sound as though Roto sections didn't exist until the 1930s.  With some simple searching today, I found the 1915 ad that references the Boston paper (added to the main text).  And a little later in 1915 I've found that the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times had a four-page Rotogravure Section by Nov/21/1915 (perhaps earlier, I haven't followed it forward);  pages 47-50 at http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=J-ba04ztB30C&dat=19151121&printsec=frontpage&hl=en .  The New York Sun also appears to have started one around that time.  In 1915 I also found many other references in one paper to a rotogravure section in another paper.  I don't find much before 1915.  These sections get bigger by the early 1920s.  It appears these were well-established long for more than a decade before the 1930s.  But since, as I understand it, "original research" is prohibited, how do I indicate this fact?  It seems that about all I can do is mention a few examples, with references.DiffuseGoose (talk) 23:48, 3 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Dug out 'History of Industrial Gravure Printing up to 1920' which contains all a boy could ever want to know about the subject. Will reference it properly shortly, and try to get past chapter 2.  European stuff happened a bit earlier so I think the US developments are of less interest, but add it back in if you feel inclined.
 * Gravuritas (talk) 00:14, 4 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Cool. Much better than the previous text. It appears that adoption in the American papers lagged the European ones by about three years, 1912 vs 1915. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DiffuseGoose (talk • contribs) 14:07, 4 December 2014 (UTC)