An Idle Digital Color Printer? Not Likely

I SUBSCRIBE to an electronic mailing list for in-plants, and lately I’ve noticed a number of postings regarding various aspects of purchasing a digital color printer. One recent posting asked a very astute question: are you planning to produce digital color for existing customers or do you plan to cultivate new customers?

This is exactly the kind of question we pondered long and hard prior to our purchase of a Xerox iGen3 last December. Where would the business come from for our new machine? Would we be “robbing” color work from our offset presses? Is there some big pocket of business out there waiting for us to buy a digital color printer? When you’re about to spend so much money, these kinds of questions can keep you up at night.

Now, with nearly 12 months of digital color production behind us, I can finally try to address some of these questions. Let me say that the iGen3 was productive practically from day one. A few days after we uncrated it, we were producing color output—literally, that fast. And we haven’t looked back, it seems we just get busier every passing month with digital color.

Where Does the Work Come From?

I think the most significant observation I can make about where the work comes from is this: it grows from simple exposure. Some customers were, of course, already doing toner color work with us. They were very happy with the new higher-quality output coming from the iGen3.

But the explosive growth is happening, I am convinced, due to a whole new kind of printing previously not offered at our plant. Our customers weren’t particularly interested in digital output versus offset. They were interested in getting 1,200 four-color brochures delivered within 48 hours though. So the first time they used digital color output was by necessity; it was their only option. But now they are aware they have a super-fast turnaround, high-quality color printing option. Color printing projects involving short runs and fast turnaround are suddenly possible.

A year ago we could not provide this kind of printing. Now it is a reality. And it’s what a whole lot of our customers want. The overtime we have been working for several months in our Digiprint department offers irrefutable testimony. We are seriously considering adding a permanent second shift on the iGen3.

It’s an odd phenomenon, to be sure. A bunch of new printing jobs that just sprang out of nowhere. It might sound silly, but that is exactly what it seems has happened to us. Where was this business before? Did it even exist? I can’t really say. But I can say I am definitely glad we made the leap into quality digital color. I was pretty sure it would work out, but I couldn’t be 100 percent certain during the decision process. It’s like the famous line in the movie “Field of Dreams”: “If you build it (or buy it in this case), they will come.” And they did.

Last-minute Printing: Here to Stay

Our faculty and staff struggle daily with complicated, last-minute decisions that inevitably result in a rush printing job. We can wail until our tongues fall out, but this just isn’t going to change. No amount of customer education will make it go away either. It’s just the way our present world works.

My point is that once you’ve presented your customer base with an acceptable rush printing option, they do not forget about it. Did this kill our offset business? Of course not. Our presses are as busy as ever. Quantity considerations alone will keep offset going for another decade or two, at least—possibly forever.

But with high-quality digital color output, jobs that would not have been produced before this technology was available are now routinely printed. This is essentially, for us, new work. It is printing we couldn’t provide before digital color. And there is a lot of it. Once your customer experiences it, they will use it again and again. Short-run posters, brochures, test runs for larger jobs, short-run newsletters, promotional pieces of all kinds, and on and on.

One key is color. The other key is the print-on-demand concept. Print 100 today, 100 more tomorrow, and maybe 300 next Friday as determined by the customer’s needs.

A designer working with color won’t go back to black and white. And a designer getting high-quality, quick-turnaround printing won’t ever forget where he or she got it either.

Variable data output factors in as well. We are producing it, and it is challenging, but it’s an important part of this new pool of business. The keys to variable data are education (internal and for customers) and pricing. Someone on your staff has to become an expert in it. And you have to charge more for this expertise and service—not necessarily with a higher printing rate, more likely through setup and data manipulation charges. At least that’s what we are finding to be true. IPG

Technical Thoughts on Digital Color

Scott McCullough, Digiprint support technician at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has many years of experience handling files in an offset environment. He now handles the more complex customer files that are to be output on the Xerox iGen3. He offers the following observations when comparing digital color to traditional offset.

• Digital printing eliminates the need to separate colors for output. This is especially helpful for customers who use Publisher, Word and other basic software.

• Digital printing provides a reasonable representation of most PANTONE spot colors.

• Digital printing has allowed us to migrate to a PDF workflow, at least for most of our digital customers. Some still prefer to submit live files, but we are in the process of training those who wish to learn to provide us with high-resolution PDF files.

• Digital output allows us to run test prints quickly and inexpensively, eliminating the need for a traditional proof. This helps us to identify problems with color, layout and transparency flattening. Essentially you are offering the customer a quick, easy and inexpensive “press proof.”

• We have worked with a number of our customers to keep their transparencies “live” in their PDF file. This allows us to control the flattening. Customers usually don’t know the capabilities and limitations of the output device so they are guessing when they do their own flattening.

• We have discovered that there is some risk involved whenever we go into the customer’s PDF file and make fixes, since there is now a difference between the native or source file and the file we actually output from. This can create problems on reprints of the job when the source file is submitted later.

• Digital printing, specifically variable data color printing, has allowed us to effectively market our in-plant while at the same time demonstrating variable data printing.

• The iGen3 has allowed us to give MU’s design students (Art and Journalism) real-world production experience, from concept to completion. At the end of a class project, the students have a very high-quality finished product for their portfolios. It has really helped our education mission.

• About the only downsides have been occasional problems reproducing some colors, especially in solid panels. And we’ve created havoc for our bindery department with a flood of short-run, super fast turnaround work on top of the offset work they are already producing.