Do you know the difference between traditional or offset and digital printing? If you’re looking to create the best sales slicks or art prints, understanding the various print offerings and options will help you get the printed piece just the way you like.

Process

Often, people hear the term ‘digital printing’ and think of desktop laser and ink-jet printers, but digital printing is so much more. Commercial printers utilize larger machines that offer better quality printing, on a variety of substrates, at an affordable cost.

When we print items on our HP Indigo digital presses, an image is sent directly to the printer from a digital file such as a PDF or an Adobe Illustrator file. This file transfer eliminates the need to create plates, like we do on our offset printer. The digital image is then transferred onto the substrate using cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and in some cases, white ink, overlaying the colors to produce the image on the substrate. This is a different process than offset printing when we physically transfer ink from a plate or rubber blanket to the printing surface (learn more about offset printing).

Sometimes, people wonder if using a combination of colors might limit color options, or create issues with exact color matching, but print technology allows printers to match colors even better than they might with offset printing. It’s also possible to order inks to exact match colors with the digital press if you find you aren’t entirely happy with the CMYK offerings.

Cost

Digital printing cuts down the time intensive processes that accompany offset printing, making it more affordable than most offset or lithography jobs. Since we no longer have to make plates, we can do short-run jobs in a fraction of the time, saving money on the ink, time and labor costs.

Substrates

Digital printing also opens up a whole world of substrates that would be either impossible or difficult to print on. For instance, printing on wood would have been difficult if not impossible with an offset printer. However, new print and paper technology makes it possible to print on wood paper that’s as thin as your typical cover stock. Not only that, large commercial digital presses can print on other items, like magnets and plastic.

Personalization

Commercial digital presses allow for personalization of short- or long-run orders. This means that we can print membership or loyalty cards with individual bar codes, personalized direct mail pieces, or newsletters with images and individualized messages from various people within your company. If you can think of an item with variable information on it, digital presses like the HP Indigo are the machines to do the job.

Proofing

The speed and accuracy of the digital presses allows for better proofing. With offset or lithography printing, creating new proofs means creating new plates, taking lots of time and costing more money.

Creating a digital proof takes less than 15 seconds when using a large commercial digital press. So if you’re in a rush to get a print job completed, digital is the way to go.

For more information about digital printing, click here.