Cambrian Printers' fine and distinguished history began in 1860 in newspaper publishing and printing.

The Read family's involvement with the company began in 1916 when Robert Read senior joined the company. The fourth generation of the Read family now runs the business which was originally founded by Sir John Gibson.

The printing division of the company grew alongside the newspaper until they separated in 1994. Cambrian Printers moved into their new premises in Llanbadarn on the outskirts of Aberystwyth over ten years ago and continue to expand on this site.

Cambrian Printers have historically met the challenge of the new and innovative, investing in the right technologies at the right time. Surviving for 140 years in a competitive business has taught us that we must embrace new technologies and develop them quickly.

In 1998 the two newspaper titles owned by the company were sold to Sir Ray Tindle and now continue under his company's stewardship.

Cambrian Printers in its early days installed one of the earliest powered presses in the World, and were among the first to use phototypesetting, and liquid polymer plate conversion of the newspaper press. Digital page make-up was invested in as early as 1987. Since then we have maintained a lead, using the latest software and hardware. Our newspapers were among the first in the world to transfer files to remote printing sites by PDF, followed by pioneering a sophisticated Sybase database publishing system. The advanced publishing techniques we developed help us to understand the printing needs of our publishing customers who demand sophistication very different from the time when work was typeset on hot metal machines, and even further from the original hand set type we first used.

Quality systems have been used by Cambrian Printers for the last ten years. In 1997 the company's business plan included the gaining of ISO 9001 quality accreditation, this was gained in 1999. Now all our processes are controlled through our quality standards.

In 1999 we installed our first thermal computer-to-plate machine. The Scitex Lotem 800V revolutionised our prepress output, improving quality and throughput and almost eliminating film and its attendant waste from our production system. Our environmentally sensitive customers enjoy the reduced environmental impact of using computer-to-plate.