Now all the pre-drupa events and announcements have taken place, this article will endeavour to assess what the new digital print products will do and how they will compare with offset presses. In this I should first define what I mean by offset printing in comparing digital printing with it. In this comparison I am mainly referring to four-color offset printing, rather than offset printing using more than four colors in order to increase its color gamut or to handle special spot colors.

I think the first comment is today the question of whether digital printing is as good as offset printing is an already answered question. As so many commercial printers are prepared to offer both offset and digital printing to their customers and make the decision before running a job about which technology to use, then the answer is digital and offset in four-color printing are essentially comparable. Offset has benefits in running speeds and of sheet size that generates many more finishing options. Many digital presses however have a significant benefit in offering in line finishing and printing of a complete product that may make use of many different substrates in just one pass. As quality is no longer really an issue the main question as where and when to use digital printing instead of offset concerns run length and running costs.

In this area of running costs and at what run lengths it becomes more economical to print offset rather than digital is a very difficult question to answer. The answers coming from offset press suppliers are rather different from those coming from the digital press suppliers. For example presentations from Heidelberg concerning their Speedmaster 52 Anicolor press that is ideal for very short run printing, puts the cross over point when it is cheaper to print offset in the region of 250 copies. Presentations however from HP Indigo about their new 7000 press indicate that they see the crossover point against a B3 offset press for an 8-page brochure at 1,800 copies and for the same job against a B2 offset press at 990 copies. The HP Indigo figures I would anticipate are not comparing like with like and the offset press they are using for comparison may not be as advanced as a Heidelberg Speedmaster 52 Anicolor. Companies like Xerox also have figures to compare run lengths. The digital companies have software programmes that compare different job types and run lengths to work out when a digital press would be a better option for running a job compared with offset. These programmes are ones that allow a printer to enter the characteristics and costs of their different presses for this comparison to be made.