Thanks for all your replies.
Learn Press in college. Gotcha.

I get to play with this printing press every night...does that help ya

wow, lurker, she is huge! whats the english term for "rollen-offset"?
A view years ago I had a job at Heidelberg Austria, and dealed with printing-material like inks, plates, paper and all those tiny stuff and chemicals. In a hall beside my office they had a place where they assambled the newest machines for demonstration or shipping them to fairs and customers. Was an interesting inview, and absolutely wealthy for my further carreer, no question.

and foot, dont spend too much time beside the machine. you seem to be more the artist in this whole procedure.

Here is another view...we run 5 of these buggers for the sat edition...big aint they

whats the normal production-speed you are working on it?

3800-4800 copies per hour 86 page print four color with 2 -3 inserts..

Those Are some big presses!

Ever got your arm caught in one?

are you talking offset press? or photo offset?
I ran a 5 color Heidelberg!! thats soo cool I need to take some picts of my plant its all web presses, and I dont know as much about them as I prob should

and I agree dont spend too much time, but it really will help you understand that part of the business!

and foot, if you cant afford the college then for sure a shop apprentece is the way to go.

Y'know Foot, I've been thinking, ( always a bad sign ) and what I think is that if your heart is more towards art then stick with that. Knowing HOW to run a press isn't as necessary as actually understanding the process from start to finish. I've been running them for over 30 years now, everything from a tabletop Gestener to a 6 color Komori. I've known guys that could rip a Heidelberg Windmill down to nuts and bolts and fix them like they were a kid's bicycle. But didn't know where the on switch was on a PC. Flip side of the coin, one of the most brilliant, creative "Graphic Artists" that I've ever met had literally no understanding of even what gripper margins were needed. She had no comprehension of what was required to create the final product after her job was done. But her work WAS beautiful. It just had to be made to fit. Very inconvenient. And costly. And counter productive.
I'm no Einstein, but I am very good at what I do and I guess my advice to you would be to focus on which part of the printing process you want to do, learn that part to the best of your ability, and at the same time find out what the guy before you did and why, and then find out what the guy after you needs and why, and then see if that's what the customer actually wants. If you can pull this off, and trust me, if you really friggin' want to you can, you won't end up like the old clown in the picture (taken this afternoon). I sincerely hope i have been of some help, GravyBoat

Sean, have you tried In-Design?

I used Quark for years, then discovered In-Design.

I will never go back to Quark.

Yeah, I dont plan on being a press master or anything.
It would help to learn it though.

Ok, when you say A 4 color printer does that mean they only print four actual colors or a combanation of four colors?

And Shaman, My dad actually works at a university so I get free tuition, Which will be nice .

Simply put, a 4 color press has 4 ink towers, each with it's own plate and ink color (CMYK) that will print each color one at a time over each other as the sheet passes through the press. I think.

its scarey i didnt learn crap about how to set up stuff for the printin press till i got a job and they were like .."make a flier". they didnt teach us anythin bout it.. just the "CMYK blahblah... use RGB blahblah cause blahblah" they didnt even teach a thing bout PMS colors either...stupid colleges. see if yer school can get a tour of a print press or have someone come in to explain how it works.

heres some happy fun reading http://swop.org/ also has a list of printers(inkjets, laser etc) that are considered "SWOP certified" which means that they "match" press print somewhat though some printer fanatics will roll their eyes to it... epson is pretty popular. i gots me a 7600 at work... all the printers that i have been to use the epson 7600 or 9600 for proofing so its gotta mean somethin.