One of the biggest challenges for the printing industry is the incorporation of digital printing with current offset technology. Some printers see the transition as a natural evolution of the basic marketing function of their company—a way to meet customers’ high expectations or to add value. Many other printers are quite satisfied both with the quality and dependability of offset, and are choosing to keep their shops oriented to that technology.
This month, we’ll be focusing on digital print processes, and their companion finishing processes, that are directly competitive (or complimentary, depending on who you ask) with traditional offset processes.
We’ll review what some of the industry leaders are saying about their digital processes now, and evaluate where they and you could be going with digital printing and finishing in the future.
As reported by John Zarwan in our last issue, of the 80% of Canadian printers with under 20 employees, 70% own a digital printer. On average, those printers get 30% of their revenue from digital including black and white. Not bad, particularly when you consider that many printers started in digital (excluding black and white) fewer than five years ago.
Digital is clearly a growth market. However, conventional offset revenue is still many times larger for most small-to-medium-sized printers. Tony Karg, Senior Director of Marketing and Business Development in Fujifilm’s Graphic Systems Division, believes that offset printers must consider digital printing technology as a way to supplement their revenue stream. Karg also mentioned that studies have shown that introducing digital into a print shop actually increases offset printing volume, rather than decreases it, as printers are better able to bring new business into their shops in areas where offset was either economically unfeasible (such as very short runs) or impossible (variable data applications).
Many printers feel that a digital component is a must, because there are some things that offset simply cannot do. But there are also things that offset can do better than digital (ii.e. colour, run lengths, substrates, etc). To determine how much digital is really necessary in your shop, you must consider your current set-up, your existing customer base and your future marketing plans, amongst other things. Going all-digital may put you in a very different business—something to ponder if you’re going after a specific market segment.
Complementing, competing or co-opting?
Even sellers of digital presses will tell you that digital and offset are complementary technologies. Unlike new print innovations of the past, digital and offset can, and should, co-exist peacefully together. Their strengths and weaknesses suit each other well. But as much as that is currently true, it may not be that way in the future. The run length break-even point for digital vs offset is getting higher and higher, and digital quality is getting better and better. Martin Cournoyer of Transcontinental’s Book Division says that digital is “already there” in terms of text applications, with quality matching that of offset on some presses, and nearly matching it on others.
There is, in many cases, less operator skill required to run digital presses, and the potential for total integration is real. In the words of Karg, “you want the operator to hit print, and have the final piece spit out the back. That way you don’t have any labour involved that can either introduce errors, or slow down the turnaround [time] on the job.” The lack of plate changes and makeready delays is also a big plus, as is the potential for short runs, variable data and with inkjetting technologies; printing with many different inks on a variety of substrates.
The positives to an all digital-shop are many, but there are obstacles as well. In many applications, quality is still not on par with the equivalent offset application. Cost is also still an issue, particularly for longer runs. Those businesses who have successfully integrated digital and offset presses are keenly aware of their breakpoints for various types of jobs.
Another issue with long runs is speed. Rarely is there a digital press that can match the speed of offset in a longer run (to be fair, though, rare is the offset press that can match the speed of a digital press on a short run). Finally, finishing integration is still in the early and experimental stages with many digital presses. As customers demand more services in the same place, offline or outsourced finishing options can slow down the time from order to delivery to an unacceptable degree.
Quality comparison
“Quality-wise, I think there are many good products on the market that compete quite favourably with offset (Xerox iGen, HP Indigo, for example),” says Fujifilm’s Tony Karg. Martin Cournoyer of Transcontinental also agrees; contending that the quality of digitally-printed black and white text is already on par with offset-printed materials.
The real quality battle, according to Cournoyer, is in greyscale applications (on two-colour presses) and in photographic applications (on four-colour presses). Innovations such as HP’s light cyan and light magenta inks (CMYKcm) and Fujifilm/Dimatix’s variable drop sizes in their piezo print heads, mean that digital photographic reproduction is getting better all the time. Further, the output of direct- or digital-imaging (DI) presses (which image plates directly on the press, giving you the best of the digital and offset worlds) is, in some cases, nearly indistinguishable from that of conventional offset.
Tony Karg also believes that “in the next ten years, inkjet head technology will advance to the point where single pass inkjet may impact the current technologies used for digital printing.” That will add to the options for high-quality digital output.
So when looking for a digital press, it is imperative to define its uses in your shop. If it’s for text or line-based work, you can rest easy on the quality front. If it’s for photographic-quality reproduction, it’s going to be harder to find the quality necessary to serve your most discerning customers.
Your future marketing strategies should also play a part in your decision. How do you want to re-think or re-tool your shop to meet projected goals or satisfy emerging markets?
Costs
Once we’ve cleared the quality hurdle, cost is the next question when contemplating a digital overhaul. Sure, you can get the testimonials about “Return on Investment (ROI) is only three months with this great new press!” or “I’ve saved thousands in labour in the first few weeks alone!” But the true measure of cost savings comes over the long term.
Check out the installations pages and subscribe to press releases to find out who’s getting the new presses first, and talk to them about how they like the press and the accompanying service. As with any technology, there are both benefits and detriments to buying in at various points of development. If you get in early, you’ll have something that your competitors don’t have. But if you wait awhile to see which presses are proving themselves and which are quietly being shelved by their development teams, you’ll have the assurance that comes with purchasing a proven winner.
The cost of the press is the first half of the cost decision, and the second is the cost comparisons between running offset jobs and digital jobs. Breakevens are rising across the industry as digital presses (and their operators) become more efficient. Shops are also becoming smarter in their mixing of offset and digital. At Transcontinental, for example, they will often run the text of a novel on their 2-colour digital press and then run the covers on an offset or a DI press.
Another place where it’s important to cost compare is in the running costs of the different pres
ses. Cournoyer talks of the “click charge” or “click cost” and contract services that come with digital presses that are foreign to offset. “We don’t have those type of costs in the offset world. It is always difficult to accept those costs when you don’t have them in the offset world. [For offset], if I don’t have a job to put on the press, I have no costs on the press. [But for digital], job or no job, I need to pay contract services. We pay if we use or if we don’t use, so it’s a bit [of a] different way to use [the press].” Click charges and contract services are another place where it’s wise to talk to others who own the press.
Transcontinental’s Book Division purchased their first digital press (an Oc’ continuous-form black and white web press) only two and a half years ago, and now counts 25% to 30% of their business as digital. They also run a two-colour and four-colour HP Indigo 5000 (primarily for colour work) that they purchased 18 months ago. According to Cournoyer, they purchased the 2-colour web press because of the “pressures of the market”. “Customers wanted to manage more themselves, and were pressing for faster turnarounds. They wanted to manage not just the unit cost of the book, but the overall [production] costs of the book.”
Particularly with smaller publishers, Cournoyer says that there is rising sensitivity to all the costs associated with publishing – the inventory, shipping and returns. The smaller inventories and faster delivery associated with digitally-produced products helps reduce costs, hence improving the bottom line. Customers may be willing to pay a premium for the value-added aspects of digital print – whether for faster turnarounds or lower inventory or “just-in-time” delivery.
Productivity
Speaking of fast delivery, speed is another important factor in the digital decision. Rated speeds can go up to 110 ppm for the Xerox iGen 3, and 272 ppm (mono) or 68 ppm (full-colour) for the latest HP Indigo model 5500. The real time savings is usually in the makeready area, where digital presses are far faster in both time saved and operator involvement needed than traditional offset presses. The fewer inputs needed results in time savings.
Transcontinental’s Book Division has learned a lot when it comes to digital, according to Cournoyer. “It’s a learning process,” he says. “When we started 2.5 years ago, there were some expectations, and we’re still learning now. We’re surprised in some cases how efficiently we can produce with the digital, [as] it’s a bit easier for us to manage a digital job [compared to an] offset job. [With offset, you] burn the plate, change the plate after each signature, you have lots of makeready, folding, gathering, etc. With the digital, you have variable data equipment and can save a lot of quality problems from human error. There are less steps on the digital row than on the offset row.”
Finishing
We can see that digital presses are making great strides towards quality, cost and at speeds that are competitive with their offset counterparts. But one area where digital still lags is in the finishing department, particularly inline or online finishing. Customers’ demands for one-stop shopping that can take them from design to finished product, coupled with their desire for increased turnaround times, means that digital finishing has great strides to make in order to be competitive with offset.
Inline finishing strives to reduce the labour – and thus the cost, time, and potential for error – involved in a print job. The most common forms of inline finishing on digital presses are stackers, folders, inserters, and stitchers, and most digital presses offer some folding and stitching options – though, as Tony Karg said, “the devil is in the details, particularly when it comes to finishing options.”
Most digital presses can fold an 11” x 17” sheet in half, but only a few can roll fold. As for stitching, most presses can stitch along an edge or corner and some have the ability to saddle stitch along the spine with two or more staples. Paper thickness and finishing capabilities limit the number of pages that can be saddle stitched.
Cournoyer would love to have an inline perfect binding solution, but he says that “for many reasons, it’s not really easy to bring a book block for perfect binding inline.” He’s working with several finishing suppliers, including Mueller Martini and Standard Horizon, but there isn’t anything yet that can bring perfect binding inline with his digital presses. If there was, he’d be thrilled!
“They need a lot of research and development to bring the block in to perfect bind without a problem,” says Cournoyer. “The problem is not the binding or the trimming, it’s the book block. Right now we need to manage it by direct labour. There should be a machine that takes the place of the direct labour. The company closest to the solution in my mind today, and it could change tomorrow, is Mueller Martini. But it’s still a work in progress for them and for everyone.” Cournoyer says that a spiral, saddle-stitch, or case-bound solution isn’t as high a priority for him, as he’s in the book division and most of their finishing is perfect binding.
Turning away from bindery for a moment, another area of finishing in which digital presses must improve is coating, particularly inline coating. There is some line coating functionality on a few digital press models (such as the iGen3), but since inline coating is typically flood coating (covering the entire surface of the page), it’s expensive relative to offset coating and therefore is not widely used. It’s typically the high-production devices that have inline coaters. Offline coaters, such as the PAT Varstar or the HP Indigo UV coater (available in September 2007), can do flood and/or spot coating, but they can be expensive relative to offset coating. According to Tony Karg, the most common way to coat digitally-printed materials is still to “take the material and run it through an offline coating device, even a printing press in some situations.”
Although a complete inline finishing solution appears in many ways to be the holy grail of efficiency, it’s best to look at your total package when contemplating which finishing options work best for you. Perhaps it would be best to have one Offline coater servicing two or three machines, rather than trying to get all three machines equipped with Inline capabilities. Different machines will mean more operator inputs, but if you’re not coating everything that comes out the back, you may be better off taking the extra operator input and not having the cost of coating built in to each of your machines.
So can we as printers address the above issues and move into a digital world? There are people on both sides of the fence, but one thing’s certain: You should take a look at digital and see if it fits in as part of your overall plan – how big a part will depend on your specific customer needs.
Catherine M.A. Wiebe
catherine@graphicartsmag.com
