The New World of Digital Color
In a highly competitive marketplace where people are barraged by marketing messages, color has become a powerful weapon to engage the eyes and minds of customers and prospects. Traditionally, offset lithography has been the technology of choice for producing high quality, color print jobs. However, with advances in digital color printing technology, marketers and creative directors now have some compelling reasons to use digital color for an increasing number of applications.
It’s time for a reality check …
Quality of Printing For many years, digital color quality paled along side offset lithography. Early digital color printers and copiers simply couldn’t meet professional image quality standards. Quality may have been was adequate for internal documents, but not appropriate for customer communications.
Today’s digital color presses are in a different class. They’ve steadily improved color depth and quality, now rivaling offset presses. Quality is optimized using high resolution art. Sophisticated software fine tunes different visual components– text, drawings, colors -- to enhance quality. What’s more, spot Pantone color matches can be achieved.
Options for Creativity One big objection that designers and creative directors have had to digital color is stock selection. Early digital printers were limited to a few, uncoated white paper stocks. So there was little room for creativity and the applications were severely limited.
Not so anymore. Advances in press technology and paper have opened the door to a wide range of printing substrates and a new world of creativity. Today’s digital color printers can provide both coated and uncoated paper stocks, gloss and matte finishes in varying weights. Plus, digital printers now have access to a variety of innovative media, including:
- Polyester and, cotton stocks for unique textures
- Magnetic stocks for advertising specialties
- Synthetic substrates for labels and decals that are water- and tear-resistant
- Durable, integrated card stocks for membership cards and customer loyalty programs
According to Standard Register’s product manager for digital color, clients can choose from hundreds of different substrates. All are readily available in small quantities for short-run print jobs.
Paper size is one of the few remaining limitations of digital color printing. Today’s digital color presses accommodate stocks up to 14” x 20” sheets. Limited? You could say so. However, this sheet size will cover the vast majority of marketing needs, including sell sheets, brochures, booklets, newsletters, direct mail, small signs and posters, membership cards, labels and decals, even certain advertising specialties.
Printing Cost For mass marketing, offset printing has always been viewed as less costly. Though offset setup costs are high, large quantity runs drive down the cost per piece. Digital printing, on the other hand, requires limited setup, so the cost per piece remains flat, and less attractive when compared to offset for longer runs.
Today, however, as organizations strive to reduce costs and improve ROI, they’re looking at digital color printing through different lenses. They’re recognizing that the cost of printing represents only a fraction of the total cost of marketing materials. Offset’s large production runs may reduce the cost per piece, but they also result in added costs for warehousing and obsolescent materials. By printing color documents on demand in quantities needed for immediate use, companies reduce their costs while gaining the flexibility to update content regularly.
At the same time, marketers have recognized the value of creating more personalized communications for specific market segments. With the variable print capability of digital, they are able to produce one-to-one communications that cut through the barrage of communications and improve results. The cost per piece is irrelevant to them. It’s the dramatic improvement to ROI that digital color printing can provide that is so compelling. A study of direct mail use by Frank Romano and David Broudy showed that by adding color and leveraging database information to personalize communications, response rates increased 500 percent.
Moreover, digital printing automates workflow and reduces the time to market, allowing marketers to be more responsive to opportunities and changes as they arise. It represents yet another added value that offsets the difference in per-piece printing cost.
Postscript
Though digital color printing may not be the end-all answer for every print job, it is a mainstream technology that more and more marketing and creative professionals are embracing. A 2006 survey of Graphic Design: USA readership indicated that 72 percent of creative professionals had tried digital color and the majority of them said they planned to use short-run digital printing more often.