"An Ode to Digital Printing," By: an offset printing rep

For anyone who has any general concern in the printing industry, the latest craze has been digital color. I won’t deny digital color has made long strides to reach near-offset quality. And certainly I won’t deny that 1 to 1 personalization has proven incredible responses on direct marketing campaigns.

But, it has its faults (e.g. small sheet sizes, no true color matching, no metallic inks, varnishes, and coatings, etc.), but frankly, I’ll be the bigger man and admit it…variable color is still pretty neat.

But just like anything in the printing industry, it has its place. For example, the maximum run volume is typically 5,000 impressions before the cost of offset becomes more viable. This is because the main costs associated to digital printing are variable, and correlated to the volume of a job. Typical costs of digital printing are: 1. Pre-press (which are normally fairly fixed as most digital print jobs don’t incur that much pre-press), 2. A flat set-up cost (fixed), 3. A per-click-charge or per-page-charge (which is variable to the job’s volume and can range between 7 to 12 cents), 4. Paper (variable), 5. And any additional finishing charges (which contain both fixed and variable costs).

The biggest costs here are the per-click-charge and the paper charges. Remember when deciding upon a job that requires variable color (or changing copy/graphics), to see if it can be gang-ran with on an offset press. At Acme we DON’T run digital presses, but we DO run significantly larger sheet-fed offset presses in which we produce semi-variable pieces.

For example, you’re a retailer printing a 10,000 piece direct-mailer in which there are 4 lots with different retail location maps on them. This may be a better fit for a gang-run on an offset press. It never hurts to test the waters both ways.

And that's my two cents...