IT TRENDS
Widening web of digital print technology
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Digital printers are not just for desktops. Anand Parthasarathy examines the challenge posed by new non-impact solutions to the traditional offset job printing press.
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OFFSET IS not dead! Long live digital! If that looks like a case of having your cake and eating it too, it is nothing less than the truth. Offset litho printing, is still by far the most widely used technology for job printing. The recently concluded `Printpack India 2005' event in Delhi, only underlined this fact of life.
But there was enough evidence too, of the shape of things to come: and one left with the distinct impression that the days of the deep thump and rumble of a big traditional press, the all pervading smell of printing ink. All this is set to vanish, replaced by compact and squeaky-clean machines, churning out printed sheets. Digital has arrived. Companies who were known till quite recently for their printing and copying solutions for the home or office, have suddenly blossomed into full-fledged solutions providers, ready to take on the analogue or traditional printing business. Their message, like that song in the fifties musical "Annie, Get Your Gun!" is: `Anything you can do, I can do better — digitally!'
Is it hype? Or have digital techniques now come up with print solutions that can match the best of the wet ink based offset processes? For a start, digital printing is not one single technology. In fact the more accurate way to describe the new-generation printers is `non impact'. Unlike offset litho, which brings an imaging surface in physical contact with a printing substrate, digital printers use one of two techniques to achieve this, both free of actual contact:
— Inkjet printers, where coloured inks are heated or charged by a piezo electric device, forced through thousands of tiny nozzles and directed to the paper.
— Electrostatic printers use the principle of Xerography, fusing dry toner to a surface that becomes electrostatically charged on exposure to light from a laser or a row of light emitting diodes.
Wide range of solutions
The xerographic printing (or laser printers as they are known in the office environment) technology was invented in 1938 by an American Chester Carlson. The Haloid Company which came up with a commercial copier product based on his inventionis now known as the Xerox Corporation.
At Printpack India, Xerox was the single biggest exhibitor — and it showcased a wide range of solutions launching 8 digital printers and 4 software solutions, end-to-end book production systems like the Nuvera, machines suitable for the emerging area of variable content printing like The Docucolor 8000, as well as large continuous feed systems like the CF 145. Yet Marcus Childs, Xerox's Vice President Marketing Operations is careful not to suggest that offset has had its day: Rather their unified workflow solutions allow one to complement an existing offset system and improve productivity by taking advantage of a digital printer whereever it makes sense, he says.
And where does it make sense? Digital has several advantages in terms of cost: the digital workflow eliminates operations like process photography and plate making and the set up time to prepare for a print run is minimal. Digital printing also makes it easy to automate the entire workflow from job creation to finishing, because all associated tasks — like scanning and character recognition — are also digital ( see diagram).
Latest light production systems from Xerox scan documents at over 100 pages per minute at one end and deliver a stream of books with up to 100 sheets, either punched or stapled at the other, while another track enables the insertion of folded sheets or other material (like colour plates) printed offline. Even more usefully, such systems can be remotely controlled and print runs initiated via Internet from another continent.
Industry standard
Indeed the whole business of digital production printing has become so specialised that some players — like EFI — concentrate on just managing digital print workflows. Its solution, `Fiery' is used by Xerox among others and is something of an industry standard.
Companies like EFI are aggressively alerting the Indian print industry to the promise of a new emerging digital printing niche: variable data (or information). This is not what it is sometimes mistaken to be — a print version of `mail merge'; at a very basic level VDP is the use of digital technology to link print engines to data bases that contain the content for the printed documents — this could be text, graphics or photos in electronic form.
Personalised mailing
For example, a carmaker can send out a thousand brochures to current owners, suggesting what is new. Using the data base of existing customers, the company can personalise each mailing, with a list of new options for that particular model; the address of the nearest dealer and even a photo or a route map to help reach it.
Thus 1000 prints will all be different in some but not all the detail. Yet — and this is the beauty of digital printers — the run speeds will remain just as fast as standard printing and there is simply no way analogue offset systems could have done this.
This is the added new edge of digital printing. But some of the digital players out there do not see laser based printing as the only option. Computer printer players like HP and Canon who have been offering both ink jet and laser printers to the home/office market have neatly graduated to large format production printers — with both technologies. And companies like the Israel-based Scitex Vision have shown that with inkjet they can go for the largest sizes and print speeds.
A few weeks ago the company installed the world's fastest high-resolution wide format digital printer — the "Scitex Vision TURBOjet" — at the Bangalore works of Autographics Digital. It prints at 400 sq. mtrs per hour.
A matter of detail
Inkjet or electrostatic may be a matter of detail; the larger message blowin' in the dry wind of Pragathi Maidan last month was that digital printing was a technology whose day has come.
It is a message that is increasingly heard too, at the events in India organized by Ifra, the international association for media publishing.
Doubters, might like to look at one telling sign: Heidelberg, the world's largest, most respected maker of large offset printers, from Germany, the country which inaugurated the age of modern printing, is also into digital printers these days.
Gutenberg, here we come, digitally?
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