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Know Your Presses — Part 1: Offset
November 3, 2007

When marketers go to have something printed, they assume that the printing process is the printer’s problem—and it is. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that knowledge of the printing process is exclusively the printer’s problem. Knowledge is power, and that includes printing, too. Knowing some basic differences between printing presses, both offset and digital, can help you make smarter, more cost-effective marketing decisions.

Let’s start with offset. There are three basic types of offset printing presses that marketers need to know about:

• offset duplicators
• standard offset presses
• digital offset presses (DI presses)

Offset Duplicators

You can think of offset duplicators as “offset light.” These are offset machines, but they are much lighter duty and don’t have as tight a registration (how closely the plates align when multiple colors are run on a job) as standard presses. Often, they are used in small commercial and quick print shops, especially for monochrome jobs. If you want inexpensive printing with an offset look and higher-than-copier quantities, duplicators are great. But the quality won’t be the same as if it were run standard offset. When walking into a small or quick print shop, if you are looking for offset, be sure to clarify whether the job will be run on an offset duplicator or a standard offset press.

Standard Offset Presses

Standard offset presses—with names like Heidelberg, MAN Roland, and Komori, among others—are what we normally think of as “offset.” These are heavy-duty production machines with outstanding color quality that generally become cost-effective at several thousand copies.

There are two “families” of offset presses: sheetfed presses and web presses. Sheetfed presses feed the paper into the press using cut sheets. They are run at lower volumes (in the tens of thousands) than web presses but provide the highest levels of quality control. Web presses feed the paper from continuous rolls at extremely high speeds. They also have excellent quality but are designed to run at the highest volumes—in the hundreds of thousands—and are generally used for long-run direct mail and publications rather than marketing collateral.

Within the sheetfed family, there are presses of different widths. In the standard commercial printing space, you will typically see 20”, 28”, and 40” presses, with the width of the press referring to the width of the paper it can run.

The narrower the press, the less expensive it is to start up and run. This translates into the ability to print in lower runs cost-effectively. All things being equal, if you have a high-quality direct mail job to be run in relatively short run lengths (say, 5,000 pieces), you may find lower prices at shops with 28” presses than you will at shops with 40” presses only.

There are presses that exceed 40”, reaching as high as 60”, even 72” or more. These jobs are generally used for packaging, but if you are running large-format prints (say 11x17”), these presses can print more “ups” across the sheet. On a 40” press, you’ll only get two 11x17” prints “up” on a 40” press, but on a 56” press, you can get three. At high volumes, this can reduce the per-piece cost of the job. Of course, the larger the press, the more expensive it costs to run, so there will be a tipping point on volume that will vary based on the job format and other details.

Direct Imaging (DI) Presses

Direct imaging presses (or DI presses) are at the opposite end of the spectrum. These are small-format (generally 20”) presses optimized for extremely short runs. They have outstanding image quality and compete for short-run jobs in the space with toner-based digital presses—down to 500 copies or so. This allows marketers to print very short runs (although not ultra short runs) with the look and feel of traditional offset. Some printers will call these “digital presses,” since they compete with toner-based presses on static short runs, but they cannot print variable data and, since they are standard offset presses (just highly automated and optimized for very short runs), there are lower limits on their cost effectiveness.

Although most marketers don’t like thinking about technology, this quick survey should make it clear that there are benefits to understanding at least the basics of different types of presses. Knowing your options helps you to most effectively match job requirements to equipment to optimize pricing, turnaround, and flexibility.

It may also spark creativity. If you know that, using a direct imaging press, you can produce offset jobs with essentially the same level of quality as you can on a standard offset press, just in quantities less than 1,000, would this influence your marketing plans? Would you print more frequently, updating your documents more often? Would you break your mailing into demographic segments? Imagine the possibilities!

Next time, we’ll take a look at digital presses.

 

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on November 3, 2007 | Comments (0)