Mind the (Quality) Gap

Most high-volume color VDP software cannot support the quality opportunities the newest digital color presses provide.

The offset qualities of the recently launched high-end color digital presses, including those launched or announced as we approach DRUPA 2024, imply that color digital printing has finally shattered the ceiling that separated it from classical printing (offset and similar).

These new presses, with their image qualities, substrate richness, and printing speeds, present a disruption for the high-end printing segment.[1] The disruption for classical high-end color printing is due to the enabling of digital – with all its unique characteristics – to play in the quality territory that was classical printing’s exclusive. The disruption for high-speed variable data printing (“VDP”) is the shattering of the mantra that it is acceptable to trade off quality to gain high-speed composition. This mantra was in harmony with inkjet printing’s performance envelope, which could only deliver “OK” (or “Business”) quality at high speed. However, the new color digital presses, which can provide top quality at top speed, are ending this harmony. Printing “OK”/“Business” quality on such presses would waste press resources, which would pressure the software leaders in high-speed VDP to change their software and close the quality gap.

I will focus this article on the high-speed VDP segment of printing’s high-end.

Before I begin, I would like to point out that I wrote a detailed and retrospective paper on a VDP practice that enables both speed and quality a few years ago. I called it On Modernizing Variable Data Printing; you can find it here. While this was a few years ago, it influenced my views and analysis, as reflected below.

The Challenge for High-Speed Inkjet Printing Software

The performance of the incumbent software solutions for high-speed inkjet printing relies heavily on the structured and rigid nature of the variability in the jobs for which they compose the VDP streams. Such variability, combined with accepting “OK” / “Business” quality, is the norm for Transactional and CCM printing.

However, favoring performance over quality may not be acceptable in other applications of high-speed printing, such as direct mail, where unconstrained and creative variability combined with top quality at top speed would be required. With the widespread acceptance of the centrality of customer experience, the CCM arena would also demand creative variability and top quality at top speed, presenting another challenge to software solutions that embrace performance over quality.

As a result, the companies behind these software solutions will either lose market share or must update their software to support the high quality and speed the market will demand once these new presses are widely available.

The good news is that by adapting their software to support object-based variability – a highly refined and non-constrained style of variability – these incumbent software leaders could generate VDP jobs that would unlock the full range of offset qualities these new color digital presses enable.[2]

Object-based Variability is Key for Top Quality

Object-based variability enables any design object in a document to be variable. Such variable objects could be of any type, at any page or location on the page, placed with any orientation, or have any dimension. Typical examples might be text, graphics, tables, or charts. Caching and reuse are on an object level, not the entire page level (e.g., page background). Such unconstrained and refined variability is critical to creating VDP that fully exploits the quality envelope these new color digital presses bring to the game. Moreover, embracing object-based variability is realistic and practical:

·       The technology exists commercially in the market,

·       The PDF/VT standard supports it,

·       leading RIP software and DFEs support it excellently,

·       few software solutions use it successfully, and

·       It has an industry-wide, generic appeal due to Adobe embracing it in its PDF/VT print definition language (an industry standard).

For these reasons, embracing object-based VDP is a realistic path to closing the quality gap. It might be challenging since it requires more from the software than simply adhering to its current rigid and structured model for variability. However, it’s a price worth paying for holding to one’s leadership.

For a detailed description and analysis of how object-based variability came to be, the interested reader can read my paper on Modernizing VDP here.

XMPie Software Implements Object-based Variability

As mentioned above, we already have software solutions built on object-based VDP, and I know one of them well – XMPie’s. It works well and proves that using objects as a basis for the variability model is effective and has a broad-range appeal. My opinions and assessments are undoubtedly biased because I am a founder of XMPie and was its leader for quite a few years. Still, XMPie’s ability to bridge the quality gap relies heavily on embracing object-based variability, an industry-wide generic concept. Hence, not only is XMPie’s software worth considering, but it is also proof of the power and readily availability of object-based variability.

A Closing Remark on Quality

I took a holistic approach to defining quality. There is no question that the rigid and constrained variability can still include an item that would benefit from offset-quality printing. It might be a picture, or it might be some demanding graphics (resolution and color-wise). However, a model that constrains creativity (in terms of design for variability) inevitably negatively influences the overall creative value of the variable data document. In this article, I took the position that constrained creativity (for variability) ultimately implies that the resulting VDP jobs can not reach the full quality spectrum that the new presses bring to market. Hence, my push to embrace object-based variability. Its refined nature and the caching and reuse of objects of such refined nature are the magic behind enabling top creative and top composition and RIP speeds. Again, the reader can learn the details behind this magic in “On Modernizing VDP” here.

[1] I use “disruption” as defined in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by the late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen.

[2] The original variability model for Transactional was the Master Page and Variable Fields, which was perfect for printing forms. It evolved through the years but is the source of the structured, rigid, and constrained variability model that the leading inkjet software solutions embraced.