For Position Only: Digital Printing’s Unfulfilled Promise
Help me out here: Something doesn’t add up.
According to recent research by WhatTheyThink.com and CAP Ventures, digital color printing is going to eat away at the offset print market in the next few years. Among the 206 print providers surveyed by CAP, 6.2 percent currently make money from digital color printing, but the percentage jumps to 29.1 percent for those expecting to do so in the next two years. Conversely, 55.5 percent of print providers surveyed by CAP currently derive their revenue from offset printing — it’s by far and away their Number One source of revenue — but that drops to just 33 percent in the next two years.
Clearly the people who do printing for a living are hip to digital presses. But what about the rest of us?
What’s on the Radar
I buy into the fact that commercial printers believe digital printing holds great promise for the future. Indeed, there are lots of great digital printing technologies out there now that are providing solid results. Devices have been on the market for a decade — toner-based web presses from Xeikon, “liquid ink” sheet-fed presses from HP-Indigo, and direct-imaging presses from Heidelberg, to name a few — and these technologies have found their way into thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of print shops globally.
More digital printing advances are on the way, too. Xerox, for example, is taking orders for its forthcoming DocuColor iGen3 Digital Production Press. The fruit of a $1-billion investment and more than 300 patents, the iGen3 is capable of printing 100 color pages per minute, which Xerox believes will revolutionize the digital printing world. And the iGen3’s imaging technology — not first, not second, but third-generation imaging technology — purports to render excellent print quality thanks to single-pass imaging along a straight paper path and newly developed toners that Xerox calls “dry inks.”
But enough free press for Xerox, here’s what doesn’t jive: Surveys I’ve seen of creative professionals, such as designers, ad agencies, and publishers, show that digital printing barely registers on our radar as a sales or growth opportunity. TrendWatch Graphic Arts, for example, routinely surveys creative professionals and regularly finds that fewer than 10 percent of respondents have plans to produce digital print jobs. When asked about variable-data jobs — variable data is supposed to be the “killer app” for digital printing — creative professionals are even less enthusiastic.
So how will printers possibly experience growth in digital printing if creative professionals barely know it exists?
Why the Lack of Interest?
I can’t say for sure why creative pros aren’t interested in digital printing, but I’ll hazard a guess. First, we’ve been preoccupied — no, obsessed — with the Web: First we switched gears and practically abandoned print and went whole hog into Web design; then it we realized that the Web should just complement, not replace, print design. Now the dust has settled and the Web, like print, is simply ubiquitous. Whether we use it to email proofs to a client or to make annual reports available for PDF download, we have at long last learned how to effectively use the Web for content delivery. Trouble is, we’ve spent so much time figuring this out that we haven’t been paying attention to how new press technologies might add value to our print messages.
“Designers are grossly unaware of the technology, but that shouldn’t matter,” says Joe Webb, founder of TrendWatch Reports. “No one has told them about the benefits and worse, no one has demonstrated a continuous flow of benefits. It’s just yet another tool in the creative’s bag of tricks, but not one that they take to the bank every day for every job.”
I think it’s time we change that. Digital printing yields excellent output quality with fewer hassles than offset printing. For example, it doesn’t entail the cumbersome makeready process associated with offset printing, so you can turn around last-minute jobs quickly, or plan appropriately and spend more time on design and review cycles. And because digital printers rasterize PostScript data and produce images on paper without going through the intermediary film or plate stage, your job gets finished faster than offset. Speaking of finishing, today’s digital printers offer a robust selection of finishing options. Of course, digital printing is optimimal for shorter press runs than offset — typically, runs are fewer than 50,000. But again, with proper planning this will let you target your pieces more directly to the intended audience: You can use it to convey your message more precisely.
It’s time for designers to start considering all the digital color printing has to offer. It isn’t right for every job, but it can, for example, add pizzazz to short-run projects that perhaps you’re used to producing in black and white. Or maybe there are inventive ways that you can customize print projects — maybe not rush headlong into variable data printing, but perhaps segment a larger job into a few smaller, tailored runs. I can’t say what exactly might work for you, but I do know that we’re creative professionals, so it’s time we start getting creative about finding a place for digital printing in our job jackets because the technology is there, and it’s ready. It’s robust, it’s high quality, it’s fast, and it’s just waiting for you to take advantage of it.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on June 13, 2002
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