On a recent Twitter tour I noticed that more and more people out there are talking about digital printing. Why? There’s no doubt that digital printing is the wave of the future, and it’s definitely changing the way commercial printing is doing business these days. More importantly, however, digital is opening up opportunities that businesses simply didn’t have using yesterday’s offset printing capabilities.
That doesn’t mean that offset printing is down for the count. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your old school printing press is out of the picture, because it’s definitely not. It’s just being used for a more…specialized line of work these days. Here’s a look at the differences between digital printing and offset printing and how your commercial printers are going to decide which one is a best-fit for your printing project.
Volume
When they’re flipping a coin to decide between digital and offset printing, volume will be a major considering factor. Why? Because digital printing is a great way for companies to create a smaller volume of marketing product, but it doesn’t offer the same potential for savings on a large volume of product that you’ll see when you’re talking about offset printing. With offset printing, the majority of your investment is upfront; once the plates are developed and you’ve reached the break-even point, which usually happens at about 1,000, the price per piece then becomes noticeably cheaper.
On the other hand, if you only need a small volume of product but you decide to order a large volume to take advantage of offset printing anyway, you could end up with boxes upon boxes of unused marketing materials gathering dust in your already over-crowded storage space until you decide to throw them out. Then what have you saved?
Medium
The other major determining factor between offset printing and digital comes when you start talking about what medium you want to work with. Although digital is rapidly catching up to the multi-media capabilities offered by an offset press, it’s not quite there yet. With an offset press you have the ability to reach out and print on cloth, wood and paper, and while digital printing is catching up quickly there are still many cases in which the printer in question will prefer to work with an offset press rather than a digital interface.
Variability
Businesses love the opportunities technology presents to start personalizing their materials, whether it be putting a name at the top of the paper or inputting a paragraph designed exclusively for a customer in the middle of the page. Can you imagine the time it would take to create thousands of unique plates for your products on an offset press? The personalization potential offered by digital variable printing is one of the key factors driving the expansion and growth of the digital printing process.
