I once had a box made for a software product, back when software came in shrink wrapped boxes. The first box cost $4000. The second box cost $0.25. After I'd handed over the files to the artist who assembled the files for printing, and had approved the layouts on her screen, she said, "You want to see the press?" I said OK, and was given ear protection. We went into the press room, where a sheet-fed 7-color offset lithography press over 50 feet long was working. They were turning out fine art prints, faster than one per second. When the box business was slow, they shifted over to making art prints on thick stock.
Look closely at the image - you should see little tiny dots of color. On a newspaper they'll be fairly large and frequently the colors don't align ("aren't registered"), which is most visible in the corners of the image. This is because they are running very fast and it's "good enough".
Perfect registration is a given for fine art printers. Correct and consistent color is the hard part.
How many printings is the drawing of the pattern on the stone good for? That to me feels like a main limitation of this technique from achieving large volumes back in the day.
I once had a box made for a software product, back when software came in shrink wrapped boxes. The first box cost $4000. The second box cost $0.25. After I'd handed over the files to the artist who assembled the files for printing, and had approved the layouts on her screen, she said, "You want to see the press?" I said OK, and was given ear protection. We went into the press room, where a sheet-fed 7-color offset lithography press over 50 feet long was working. They were turning out fine art prints, faster than one per second. When the box business was slow, they shifted over to making art prints on thick stock.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vaoGoQfZ_4