Short-run printing and selection (on)

Although digital color printing continues to devour the analog color printing market, small format traditional offset printing still occupies a certain market space.
In the past ten years, digital technology has been infiltrating into the prepress and printing process. From the trend of page imposition, file transfer, plate imaging and printing, we can see that the simulated production process is gradually transitioning to digital.
The last difficulty in digital technology is the press itself, which is also undergoing digital transformation. However, although digital printing has attracted the attention of people in the industry and there are more and more topics concerning digital technology, traditional offset printing technology still occupies a considerable space, even for small-scale operations, in this area. Copying technology has a clear advantage.
In the past 20 years, A3 and A4 format office printing and copying technologies have made remarkable progress, mainly in terms of quality stability and performance improvements. At the same time, digital printing technology is also developing at an alarming rate, and each time the degree of technological improvement is getting smaller and smaller, the time interval is getting shorter and shorter.
It is obviously unfair to confuse digital presses and copiers, but there are many essential similarities in technology, especially for toner-based digital presses.
In addition to applications, digital printers and printers are trying to simulate the output quality of traditional offset printing technology. Under this driving force, the difference between color copiers and digital printers is shrinking.
However, there is still a clear distinction between digital technology and analog products. That is, for many printing companies, the gradually mature digital printing technology has a very attractive charm, and the low price of traditional processing methods also attracts customers. These two aspects are in a paradoxical state.
The confusing state Just as digital press technology continues to improve and gradually stabilizes, the performance of analog presses is also moving toward faster and more efficient. This phenomenon makes it difficult for customers to make decisions when investing in new short-run color printing equipment. What really determines is not which model of printer or printer to buy, but rather whether it is the purchase of a digital device or an analog device.
According to experience, digital printing has advantages over analog printing when the number of prints is between 500 and 1,000 printed sheets. For jobs below this volume, the advantages of digital devices are unmatched because they save on prepress costs. Therefore, many digital printing applications have been applied to new business models, such as personalized marketing materials and non-traditional types of print products, which are not accessible to analog printing. In this sense, it is impossible to make a concrete comparison of the costs of the two printing methods because digital printing also includes data processing and customer service, which are lacking in traditional printing methods.
Some new types of equipment, such as Xerox's Docutech 6060 or HP's Indigo 1000, are often used in short-run color printing. Although analog printing equipment can also perform these tasks, its competitiveness is significantly reduced.
It is 10 to 15 copies of ultra-short print jobs, or variable data printing (VIP), that the analog printing simply cannot compete with. The current market in this area is still in the early stages of development, but its development is very fast. The main reason for its unstoppable growth rate is due to market and cultural factors, not technical reasons.
Necessary data processing and imaging technologies are all in place and functioning, and data standards are gradually becoming stable, such as the Personalized Print Mark-up Language (PPML) and PDF formats. (To be continued)