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Know Your Presses — Part 2: Digital
November 12, 2007

Last time, we looked at the key families of offset printing and how understanding these differences can help marketers better plan their printing for cost effectiveness and flexibility. This time, we’ll look at digital presses with the same goals in mind.

(This post will take a 50,000-foot view of these presses, but for a more granular look, with a side-by-side look at the specs of today's digital production presses, readers may want to consider The Industry's Measure's latest report, "Production Digital Press Specs: At a Glance.")

It’s more difficult to classify digital presses into families, however, because equipment design exhibits more of a continuum than solid family breaks. That said, here are three basic classifications that marketers need to know about:

• Small-format copier/printers
• Production digital presses
• High-speed inkjet presses

You can think of small-format copier/printers as “digital printing light.” But unlike the relationship between offset duplicators and standard offset presses, the “light” has more to do with volume than it does with quality.

It used to be that “copiers” meant inferior quality. They were, after all, copiers, not production printers. But with the digital printing explosion, the imaging systems and the color consistency of these devices have been dramatically improved. RIP options have also been expanded to move them into a true production role, including variable data for database-driven 1:1 printing jobs. Output isn’t going to look like that from a half-million dollar Xerox iGen3 or Kodak NexPress, of course, but it is certainly acceptable for a wide range of business applications.

Production-volume digital presses. With names like Xerox iGen3, HP Indigo, Xeikon, and Kodak NexPress, among others, these are digital presses designed to produce jobs in the several-thousand-piece range. You aren’t going to use them to produce 100,000 direct mail pieces, but you will use them to produce short runs of high-quality marketing collateral or 10,000 1:1 printing pieces. While there are some presses, such as those mentioned above, that are undisputedly distinct from digital copier/printer/presses, the distinction is not always sharp. The continuum of speeds and imaging quality is large, and the crossover point between copier/printer/press and production press varies, depending on who you ask.

There are two ways to slice the production-volume press market: sheetfed vs. web and imaging type.

Sheetfed presses feed the paper in individual sheets, so the maximum and minimum paper sizes are important for determining the sizes and formats of jobs that can be run on these devices. Web-fed presses feed the paper in rolls, so in terms of understanding job efficiency, marketers need to know the length of image that can be printed in each pass and whether or not images can be "stitched" together to create larger images, such as banners.

Unlike the offset market, where offset ink is offset ink, there is a wide variety of imaging methods used in the digital printing industry. In the color production machine space, the primary imaging types are liquid toner and dry toner. In the black-and-white space, there is electrophotography vs. magnetography. In the small-footprint copier/printer space, we also have inkjet and waxy toner. These differences are more than academic, since each of these imaging types has an impact on the appearance of the printed output and  the flexibility of your marketing.

High-speed inkjet digital presses are designed for high-volume production of personalized and non-personalized publications and direct mail. Most can produce four-color at about 300 dpi, so you aren’t going to get advertising-quality images, but you will be able to run 500,000 pieces. Until recently, there was only one heavy-hitter in this space—the Kodak VersaMark—but Screen USA recently broke in with its TrueJet 520, which run slower but offers better image quality. Xerox is set to introduce a product into this space in the next several months, as well.

This doesn’t exhaust the distinctions, of course. There are some slower, small-foot print machines like the Oce CPS 900 whose image quality rivals that of the production presses, even though it runs at the slower small-footprint speeds. And, as already stated, there are subtle differences in the appearance of the output and differences in flexibility of the substrates based on the imaging method used. Of course, there are those format differences — sheetfed vs. rollfed, different format sizes of paper—that impact the cost-effectiveness of various publications, as well.

We’ll look at these issues more in-depth next time.

 

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on November 12, 2007 | Comments (0)