Duncan Newton, Kodak. A Balance Shift - Offset Print & the Prosper 5000XL
Posted on Mon, Oct 25, 2010 @ 06:30 AM
I was in the Philippine national printing office in Manila the other day looking at one of the older offset machines they were using there. It was loud and slow and clunky, but it had every right to be. That machine was made in the early 1900s. It’s a museum piece, but it’s still in regular use. And it made me think again about the continuing battle between offset and digital printing.
I used to talk about digital inkjet technology and use the phrase “offset replacement”. Then I adjusted my stance and started calling the technology “offset complementary”. Now I’ve gone back to thinking in terms of “offset replacement” again. I may flip-flop on this again one day. But the real point is that – as things have stood up to now – both technologies have had real inherent strengths and advantages.
Offset presses were designed to produce a lot of printed pages in a very short time, and to do it as cheaply as possible. They’ve been fast and inexpensive and produced very high quality. And digital hasn’t been able to match this, in the past.
So the challenge for the digital people has always been “What is it we can do that the offset printers can't do?” That has meant focusing on short runs, variable data, photobooks, and so on, and avoiding head-on confrontation with offset technology. By defining those business niches, it has always been possible to dance in front of the bulls and not be gored.
- But offset is a fully developed technology.
- Digital inkjet is young and still developing.
So when we get a breakthrough like Kodak’s Prosper 5000XL, we know that the combination of offset-class image quality and high speed it offers is not the end of the line. There is plenty of headroom to develop the Stream inkjet technology further. Yet what we have already is clearly a game-changer.
Suddenly, there’s a color inkjet machine that is fast and good-looking and cheap to run, without the trade-offs we’ve had to put up with in the past. We call that “digital without compromise”.
From where I sit – which, these days, usually seems to be roughly 35,000 feet above either the Pacific or the Indian Ocean – it seems obvious that inkjet and offset will be working side-by-side for some years to come. I see inkjet allowing offset presses to focus on doing what they do best, while creating a viable alternative for the things to which offset is not well suited.
In the longer term, though, the writing’s on the wall.
In China, the government has ordered every public sector printing operation to start evaluating and adopting digital, and imposed a five-year deadline.
You can see why. Run lengths are down there, too, and I’ve even been told about efforts they had been making to do print-on-demand using existing offset equipment. That’s not something I’d wish to embark on, but it underlines that shifting requirements like print-on-demand are creating more awareness of the value of digital inkjet.
And if China is all-digital in five or even ten years’ time, where’s that going to leave the rest of the world if we don’t follow suit?
Let me know your opinions on Digital Without Compromise via the Prosper 5000XL and how it affects your business.