Digital printing technology comes of age

Just like its sister mediums photography, music and video, printing has been migrating to digital technology over the past 10 years. For the most part digital printing is faster, easier to edit and less expensive than offset printing.

But experts say the printing industry never will convert completely because offset is still the best solution for high-volume printing.

“The big difference between digital and offset is there’s little or no setup costs to print something with digital,´ said Jeff Greenberg, a printing industry management consultant with Mind Meld Consulting in Boulder. Digital printing “enables you to print small quantities at a workable economic cost.”

The setup for digital printing involves creating a digital file and sending it to a networked printer, a process not much more sophisticated than clicking the printer icon in Word to print the file on a desktop printer.

The printing presses are relatively inexpensive as well, he said. According to Greenberg, a print shop could purchase a large-format digital machine for about $6,000 to print posters, although machines can range into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Setup for offset printing is time consuming and requires trained personnel, Greenberg said. It involves creating a plate of the image to be printed, which transfers ink to a rubber-covered cylinder, which then “offsets” the ink to the paper. The presses are more expensive – even the low-end ones are hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For big jobs, however, offset is less expensive than digital, Greenberg said.

That’s why some of the bigger printers in the area – Broomfield-based Signature Offset and Boulder-based Johnson Printing Co., for example – don’t do digital.

Johnson Printing was a beta tester for an IBM digital printer about 10 years ago, but the technology didn’t make sense for a company that prints large-run magazines, journals, catalogs and books, said Marketing and Sales Manager Steve Iwanicki.

“We reached a crossroads where we either needed to get into that in a big way or stay in the offset-printing world,” Iwanicki said.

The company uses heat-set and cold-set web presses and sheet-fed presses that can print up to a half-million pages per hour, while a digital press is capable of between 2,000 and 5,000 pages per hour, Iwanicki said.

Web presses use rolls of paper rather than sheets; heat-set web presses use heat to set the ink while cold set presses do not.

But the company is considering adding digital presses in the future. “We see some applications and improvements in the technology now that make it worth another look,” Iwanicki said.

Eight Days a Week, a printing and copy shop in Boulder, uses digital technology exclusively.
The company has never done offset printing, said Sam Sussman, who owns the company with his wife, Cheryl. Prior to digital printing, Eights Days a Week used analog printing, he said.

“The difference between digital and analog is that with analog you’re taking the whole image and transferring it. In digital you turn the image into pixels,” Sussman explained.

Digital technology allows for larger, clearer images, he said. The company can print images up to 5 feet wide by “any length,” he said.

“In the oversize area digital is very competitive. It’s actually a miracle – a few years ago you couldn’t do a big print.”

The real advantage to digital printing isn’t size, it’s the ability to print variable text and art, said Sue Gunn, chief executive officer of Boulder-based marketing/communications company CTSi.
Gunn used the example of apartment complex newsletters to define variable imaging. If a management company managed complexes in Colorado and Florida, it could use the same basic newsletter but vary some of the stories and images, she said. “For Colorado you see the Rockies, and in Florida you see palm trees.”

The differences are produced in the digital file sent to the printer, much like personalized letters can be set up in a word processing program like Word, she said.

CTSi recently set up a Web site where the cable industry – one of CTSi’s biggest client areas – can purchase holiday cards that can be personalized for the recipient.

“It’s a kind of a site where you can choose your art and change your text. There’s a lot of flexibility,” Gunn said. For example, some cards could say “Merry Christmas” and others “Happy Holidays.”

Selecting best price

A number of area printers – D&K Printing and Minuteman Press, both of Boulder, for example – provide both offset and digital printing.

They decide which technology to use based largely on the number of copies needed.
Gary Bennett, president of D&K Printing, said for more than 5,000 8-1/2-by-11 four-color copies he chooses offset.

Because of offset’s setup cost, Bennett said, the price for quantity drops steeply. “The first sheet (of offset) is $2,000 … the second one is 5 cents.”

No matter the quantity, D&K charges customers about $1.50 per digital print. Those copies cost D&K about $1 to print between rent, equipment, personnel, paper and “click charge,” Bennett said.

The click charge is like a meter reading of the number of copies printed and relates to supplies and maintenance provided by the printer’s manufacturer, Bennett said. Clicks are based on the number of colors and sides of the paper printed.

“We pay for every single click. With offset, the meter is not running,” explained Ginger Anglen, co-owner of Minuteman Press.

“The downside of digital is that it’s very expensive on a per unit basis because the materials are very expensive,´ said printing consultant Greenberg. “H-P calls its ink ‘the most expensive fluid on Earth.’ It’s about $200 an ounce, so for large runs it’s not cost effective.”

But sometimes the decision whether to print digital or offset is based on turnaround time.
“You can turn (digital) around faster because you don’t have to make plates, and you don’t have to wait for it to dry,” Anglen said.

High-end, high-speed “production” digital presses are still pretty rare in the printing industry, according to George Alexander, senior analyst with Caslon & Co. Inc., a Rochester, N.Y. market research firm for the printing industry. Those presses include Xeikon, Xerox’s iGen3, Kodak’s Nexpress and Hewlett-Packard’s Indigo (D&K has one of these).

The installed base for high-end presses, which cost between $250,000 and $1 million, is about 4,000 in the entire U.S., Alexander said. With about 40,000 printers in North America, that’s only about 10 percent market penetration, he said.

But, Alexander said, there’s an overlap between high-end office printers and lower-end production digital presses like those in most Boulder Valley print shops. “If you include those, then virtually every printer has one of these devices,” he said.

Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at (303) 440-4950 or csellis@bcbr.com.

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