Digital printing powers on
Monday, 08 August 2011
Digital printing is offering an increasing number of opportunities to commercial printers, Wayne Robinson looks at how to make the most of your investment
Digital printing is, or ought to be, on the agenda of every printer in the country. It is almost 20 years since the first digital print engines, the Indigo and Xeikon, were launched and while digital’s ascendancy is taking longer than their earlier proponents believed it would, there is no doubt that today digital is a mainstream print solution, and offers tremendous opportunity for printers of every hue and cry.
What’s more digital offers the opportunity to get into new markets, and to add value for clients, and therefore margins for printers. By integrating your digital printer into a web to print solution for instance, by incorporating variable data capability software, by running a completely automated workflow, and inline finishing, the digital print system offers printers a new way or working a and way that should deliver efficiencies and profits.
Those profits though have be worked hard that offset print. A run of 20,00 16pp brochures printed offset for instance is a relatively straightforward job, and relatively straightforward to calculate costs and margin, and with plenty of room for tolerance in there. However a run of five on a digital press requires very careful efficiencies to make it pa, and it could easily go over budget leaving the printer with zip in the profit column.
Those looking for digital printing just to make cheaper A4 pages will not be the ones that make a decent go of it. It is in the value added markets where the real margins are to be made, with variable data, web to print and applications that combine all these such as photobooks that the real money is.
Web to print, that is setting up your own web portal so that your existing and potential customers can order print over the internet, is not a black art, there are several off the shelf solutions available, some for a relatively inexpensive start up cost. Web to print and digital print are natural bedfellows, as everything is digital. In theory the customer keys in the order, if necessary uploads the artwork, and the file is sent straight to the printer queue. For casual customers payment may be made before the job is produced, for regular clients the software automatically invoices. There are other benefits too, Grish Rewal, managing director of Absolute Electronics which supplies the Xeikon printer says, “Web to print is very important as it reduces overheads for sales and account management .”
Web to print also has the benefit of creating closer printer / client relationship, your customer is going to find it harder to turn to someone else if your icon is on their desktop. Kathy Wilson at Ricoh says, “Web to print is very important as it opens up another entry point for print providers, it makes it easier for their customers to do business with them. Web to Print solutions such as DSF provide the ability to manage an on-line catalogue of products including, but not restricted to, digital print products, and this means the customer returns to the print provider for re-ordering of repeat products. By adding products as stationary or coffee mugs or other POS pieces, the on line catalogue is not restricted to digital print.”
Shane Lucas, director, HP Graphic Arts South Pacific says, “Web to print is extremely important as it plays to the strength of short runs, quick turnaround with indistinguishable quality from offset.” Rene Kisselbach at InfoPrint Solutions says, “The key trends are offset printers moving to digital print and enabling precision marketing-based applications (transpromo), his typical involves a significant upgrade in software and workflow, and transaction printers expanding into the same segment, providing marketing-based print and electronic communication services. Web to print functionality is the on-ramp to these new segments.
Herbert Kieleithner at Oce says, “Web to print software is becoming increasingly important as it decreases turnaround times and allows for on the fly checking and correcting of files. A well tuned system can increase the volume for print shops and print rooms by 20-30 per cent as we have seen from various of our customers. What is important to consider is that the online solution where the end user submits his files needs to be easy to understand and follow logical steps which make it simple to send work to the printer. Some web-to-print solutions look more like an extension of a printer driver with no real preview of what the job will look like once it is completed. Océ offers online portals which are easy to navigate, deliver accurate costing and previews of the jobs submitted and always lead to the desired outcome therefore eliminating mistakes and the need for costly reprints.”
Web to print does require thought, and won’t instantly result in a boom to your business, but for digital printing in particular it offers the best way to optimise your profits, maximise your efficiencies, and minimise costly errors.
Digital printers themselves are now coming in an ever-broadening range, with the Vendor Focus features on the following pages highlighting most of the leading players. Print quality continues to rise, whether it is at offset quality is a moot point, but the key factor is whether it is at a quality that the market will wear, and on this point there is no doubt that digital delivers, as anyone who visited PrintEx a couple of months ago will have seen.