Offset Printing’s Digital Alternative

It’s the last frontier for the paper document. Each day, billions of pages

are created digitally–for newspapers, magazines, brochures, books. But their

last step is analog–the good old high-speed color offset press, which you can’t

beat for economy and quality at volumes.

That should change a bit this year. It’s a change less visible than those

we’re used to in technology, where we keep seeing cooler, smaller, faster,

cheaper end-user products. But it can spell a revolution all the same.

But first, how important is paper in a digital world? It rules. Guess what

caused workplace paper usage to shoot up? E-mail and Web pages. Xerox, the

copier giant that’s busily transforming to a ‘document management’

company, adds that the billions of e-mails that cross the world daily generate

millions of printouts… people like to print their e-mail.

The "analog" offset press churns out a bulk of brochures and

newspapers and magazines each day. As I mentioned on this page six months ago,

digital printing makes up a razor-thin slice of a global printing pie worth a

trillion dollars.

That’s changing, as we’ve seen in this new millennium. A small but

visible start happened with utility and credit card bills.

Once spewed out from dot-matrix or line printers fed by rolls of preprinted

forms, the bulk of them now go through a single step in hybrid offset-digital

machines. Plain paper goes in, and color printing is immediately followed by

black variable-data digital printing. This allows flexibility, speed and

economy.

The next step is digital color output. Desktop printers do a few pages a

minute. High-speed printers (and copiers) from companies such as Xerox, Canon

and HP can print at speeds many times that. The per-page cost is much more than

offset printing. But offset is expensive at low volumes, and digital color print

costs are dropping.

The state-of-the-art here is possibly Xerox’s DocuColor iGen3 "digital

production press". It’s the ultimate offset alternative for small-run

print jobs, outputting complete, bound, color brochures, printed at up to 6,000

impressions per hour (these are company specs; but I did see these printers in

action at Xerox facilities in and around New York last month). And while this

class of output devices (not yet released in India) will initially find their

way into a few print shops, next in line could be large enterprises that need to

print a lot of short-run brochures, for instance… and zero-inventory

bookshops.

And this closing of the digital chain–ensuring that documents that

originate digitally are reproduced digitally, somewhere on the network–could

change printing, the way DTP revolutionized the page makeup and pre-press

process ten years ago.

Prasanto K Roy