Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

Time to Move Print Out of the 1990s?
April 21, 2008

I got hit by a bit of nostalgia this week. When I first started covering the printing industry, it was 1993. I was the editor of Printing News and the cover story was the installation of a pair of the first Indigo E-Print digital presses, now the HP Indigo series of machines. At the time, printers were required to buy them in pairs, but adventurous printers did. The cover photo was some kind of piano-moving equipment lifting them high into the air to be installed at a non-ground-level printing location.

How times have changed. At that time, you could count the number of digital press models on one hand. Distinguishing them was easy. One was rollfed. One was sheetfed. One was from Agfa. The other two were from companies no one had ever heard of.  Today, the ability to rattle off even the top-level categories of digital presses would be paramount to knowing the capitals of all 50 states.

Now that the Industry Measure has closed, I’ve been working on updating the three reports in the Marketer’s Primer Series I developed—one each on digital printing, 1:1 printing, and Web-to-print. I was amazed how much there was to update on the digital printing report, even from when it was released six months ago. It’s not just the technology (although it's cool that high-speed inkjet for packaging has now been released from Agfa). It’s the rapid expansion of applications the technology drives.

Some major changes in the last few years that marketers should care about?

• Quality on par with offset.  Unless it's liquid ink (available only from HP Indigo), the toner will sit on top of the paper, giving it a slight different look. But these presses print up to 2400 dpi. The quality is very, very good.
• Ability to print five, six, and seven colors. Not all presses can print spot colors, but a growing number can. And the simulation capabilities using color profiling is getting better all the time. Think you can't print your corporate color on a digital press? Think again. It might not be 100% on, but it might be 98% of the way there.
• Ability to print on non-paper substrates. Film. Foil. Magnetic stock. Folding cartons. Today's presses are capable of printing on an unbelievably wide variety of substrates. I wrote a report for The Industry Measure that enables side-by-side comparison of digital press specs, including substrates. If you want to familiarize yourself with the range of press capabilities quickly, it's a good resource. (IM reports will still be available for purchase on the IM site for the new few months.)
• Full range of speeds, from light production printers to high-speed printers capable of outputting 1:1 personalized direct mail in the millions.

If you want to print it digitally, it's out there. Richard's report on the newspaper industry's focus on personalizing newspapers drives that point home even more. We've come a long way from excitement over "mere" static short-run, print-on-demand. This technology has changed business models. It has changed marketing models. It has changed document management in a radical way.

Are you still printing the same way, using the same old document management models, and the same old print marketing techniques? If so, maybe it’s time to get out of the ‘90s.

Have questions? Comments? I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at htollvr@aol.com. For more information on primers for marketers and small businesses on digital, 1:1, and Web-to-print technologies, visit www.digitalprintingreports.com.

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on April 21, 2008 | Comments (0)