Inkjet Static
Jun 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Frank Romano
In the 1950s, as offset litho and photocomposition were making inroads, letterpress people said offset was only good for quick and dirty printing. In the 1980s, as digital printing was making inroads, offset people said toner-based digital print was only good for quick and dirty printing. Now the toner-based digital printing people say that inkjet-based digital printing is only good for long runs at low quality. Do you see a pattern?
The excuse that most commercial printers give for not moving to new printing technology is that their buyers would not accept the quality. Yet, every new printing technology has found a ready market and has grown in volume. Both print buyers and their printers are conservative but, over time, they both change.
Offset will stick around
While offset litho pretty much put letterpress out of business, digital printing probably will not put offset out of business. The black-and-white digital printer (like the DocuTech and DigiMaster) essentially wiped out the offset duplicator. The entry-level printer is now the digital color printer.
The term “digital printing” refers to any process that regenerates the image for each page impression. Ink-based presses require static image carriers (plates), but digital printing uses toner (dry or liquid) or inkjet (CIJ or DOD). You might say that all printing is digital because it starts with digital files, becomes plates that are imaged digitally, and is printed from plate images that are actually patterns of dots.
Offset litho, flexo, and gravure are called static printing processes because every impression is the same. If the impressions are different, the printer did something wrong. Digital printing is called variable because every impression can be different. The irony is that most digital printing printed today is static — in mostly short runs. The promise of digital printing is applying its variability for personalization (direct marketing), versioning (promotional material) or customization (ads on transaction documents).
As a print buyer, you will buy all kinds of print. Some of you will say that offset is the only print you will buy. Others will see advantages in buying digital print. A good example was a recent trade show where offset press manufacturers had press conferences (for the press and about presses). They gave out beautifully printed brochures printed on their presses — but they also gave out copies of the presentation handouts printed on digital color printers. Paradoxically, digital printer manufacturers gave out litho-printed brochures while their digital printers were running collateral and promotional materials.
In other words, we will be buying print in all forms depending on the application, cost, schedule, stock and run length. We will have to decide not only between static and digital print, we will have to decide between toner and inkjet digital print. In June 2008, a new breed of production inkjet roll-fed and sheetfed inkjet printers were introduced. These are not wide-format printers for signage; they are high-speed production inkjet printers. Many will not hit the market until 2009 or even 2010.
A reporter once called me and asked how many desktop inkjet printers were needed to print the NY Times. I said it would take an infinite number, especially when it came to threading the roll of paper through each of them. Now, there are toner and inkjet roll-fed printers that can actually compete with roll-fed litho presses in speed and quality.
Understanding all alternatives
Thus, we enter the age of simultaneous multiple competitive printing processes. You will be buying all of these printing processes at the same time. If certain brand colors are not reproducible by a certain process, you have alternatives. For very short or very long runs, you have alternatives.
More alternatives mean you need to understand where each process is applicable — you need to understand what each process can and cannot do. But you are print buyers and you can do anything.
Contact Romano at fxrppr@rit.edu.
