Digital Gaining Ground in Short-Run Color Market
Staff -- graphic arts online, 7/1/2002
Digital printing in all its incarnations first appeared to serve what was perceived as a vast, untapped market for short-run color printing.
Looking at it from printers' perspectives, short-run color using traditional presses has been the preference. For example, in the Spring 1999 TrendWatch Graphic Arts survey, 14% of print businesses polled said that they preferred using traditional presses for short-run color. But over time that percentage has declined, to 11% by Spring 2002.
Short-run color using direct-imaging (DI) offset presses (like the Heidelberg QM-DI) started out at 7% in Spring 1999 and has been up and down, rising back up to 8% in Spring 2002. However, short-run color using digital presses (like Indigo) is on an upward trend, starting at 7% in Spring 1999 and rising to 13% in Spring 2002. As it stands now, it is the preferred printing method for short-run color, say TrendWatch survey data.
The market for DI presses has not grown as many predicted, largely because printers tend to keep their capital equipment around for a very long time. While many shops are slowly beginning to acquire new equipment, it appears that many (mainly quick printers) are opting for Indigo and Xerox DocuColor machines versus DI presses. Here, as output quality issues continue to be largely resolved with the toner-based devices, digital color printing technology is being seen as more and more viable.
At the same time, digital printing as a sales opportunity among design and production firms reached a high of 9% in Winter 1999/2000 but has been on a downhill trend ever since, although it is up slightly in the most recent survey. For many creatives, what goes on in a print shop is an invisible, mysterious process, and as long as a job gets printed correctly, they don't fuss too much about how it actually got that way. Thus, vendors trying to sell digital printing solutions to the printing industry would do well to focus at least part of their efforts on reaching designers, as they are the people who actually buy printing.
