Color Digital Printing: Welcome to the Evolution

Color digital printing has given the printing business a new lease on life as new color printing presses edge out traditional offset printing technology in color richness, quality, and print media flexibility. It won't be long until offset printing ends up on the dust heap of other previous inventions like the typewriter and the pay telephone. Color digital printing stands alone as the most viable printing solution for all industries and professions.


The main differences between digital printing and traditional methods such as lithography, "gravure", or letter press are that no printing plates are used, resulting in a quicker and less expensiveturnaround time, and typically a loss of some fine-image detail by most commercial digital printing processes. The most popular methods include ink jet or laser printers that deposit pigment or toner onto a wide variety of substrates including paper, photo paper, canvas, glass, metal, marble and other substances.

In addition to superior quality, color digital printing utilizes a software framework to set up document printing, which eliminates the time and labor spent altering the mechanical structures of an offset printer. What this means in practice is that digital color printing opens up two options that are simply not tenable in an offset environment:

1. Variable Data Printing
All of the set up work is done via software, digital color printing allows smaller internal alterations on printed media to be performed on the fly. This might be a client's name, print run number, date, tabulated dollar amount, or any other form of printing that would vary from copy to copy of the media being produced. Variable data printing alone makes digital far superior to offset innearly any printing capacity, and the time and collars saved from VDP translate directly into profits or dollars saved for the publishing organization.

2. Print On Demand
Once a labor-intensive printing process, now with the ease of a computer and keyboard, an entire digital print job can be created, stored and then quickly up-loaded for digital printing on a color press. With no mechanical adjustments to be made, a digital printer is free to do short run printing, smaller orders or to print a customer's protect on demand. An excellent example is for a book publisher. With print on demand, a book only needs to be printed once an order is placed, saving the high expense of printing multiple copies of a book to only have it sit, unsold.

The digital printing can offer significant benefits with new and unique technology. Smaller toner particles and greater reduction in printing oil allows digital printing to have a very near offset lookas well as texture. With color digital printing the future is not in doubt. And this future will see color digital printing revolutionize printing practices. Even the paper industry has undergone a transformation as new and unique papers like vinyl paper, decal paper and even waterproof paper have been created for use in digital printing.

Oliver David writes articles for websites on a variety of topics like waterproof paper and vinyl paper.