Digital Printing Offers Many Benefits   by Jeremy Winters

in Computers / Hardware    (submitted 2011-04-26)

The advancement and development of technologies over the past decade has added a lot of technical improvements, more options and new features to the commercial printers of the present. Along with this new increase of technology there's often a bit of confusion attached. An awareness of exactly where digital printing has come from, the benefits it offers at present and how it compares to different methods of printing, is critical in making the proper decision when it's time to click that print button.

Right now, probably the most prevalent high volume commercial printing technology is offset lithography. With offset printing, the image that's getting printed is first of all burned onto a plate and is then transferred (or offset) from the plate, onto a rubber blanket, then ultimately on the printing surface. The whole lithographic process works as a consequence of the qualities of oil and water and the way they interact with each other.

The image that's being printed gets the ink from the ink rollers, while the non-print areas get a thin film of water, making it possible for these sections to stay ink-free. With offset lithography you get a good, clean image however there are various mechanical steps which are essential to get the ultimate product and that can be tedious.

Digital printing eliminates a lot of these mechanical steps that are required for traditional printing, such as creating the films and color proofs, putting the pieces together and making plates. This translates into a quite streamlined process in terms of printing. It also enables each print to be precisely the same since the printer doesn't have to balance the flow of ink and water while in the press run.

There are numerous advantages that digital printing has over the competing options and it is all based on the simple fact that it's a lot more practical and accessible for daily printing. It is less costly, lower volume printing however despite the fact that each piece could cost a little more then offset printing, when setup expenses are introduced as well, printing digitally provides a substantially lower cost per unit for really small runs. An additional benefit is the variable data printing capacity, which is a form of customizable printing where utilizing data from an external file or database allows text and graphics to be altered on each piece without the need of slowing down the printing process. This kind of printing is mostly used for marketing, customer relations and direct mail marketing and will speed up the whole process.

With the amount of advancement in commercial printing it is easier then ever to print out our favorite pictures, reports and birthday cards and the advancement of printing digitally is the reason.

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