Welcome to The Odee Company. We’re gonna talk about digital color printing today.
Our digital color press is an HP Indigo 3050. We actually looked at all the available presses in the market when we were trying to get in the Digital Color, looked at the Nexpress, the IGen3 and the Indigo 3050. We made the decision to go Indigo 3050 primarily because we are an offset printer and we wanted the absolute closest thing to offset printing that we could find.
The reason why this became the closest to offset is because it is the only digital machine that has liquid ink technology. The others two are toner based so you still have that kind of layer look of color. This also is the only digital press that can give you true pantone colors. As you can see you got seven tubes. You got CMYK and then you have three other options, right now we have again [...] hi-fi colors [...] to actually give more vivid colors but you can also do pantones and then we also have the available of do it matte, you now, a varnished type of thing although it is not protective it’s nearly mean as accent.
That’s the reason that you get the absolute closets thing to offset on this machine is its liquid ink technology. It’s called Electro Ink. It’s Electro Ink 4.0. It’s also very eco-friendly, even more friendly than vegetables offset inks.
This is our imaging unit. This is the laser imaging unit. You can see we’ve got seven different units. What this does is very different to offset. On an offset press we would grab a sheet and then take it through each unit as a stack all the way across the press. On the digital, what we are doing is, we are taking that sheet, gripping it and we would actually running through this same area to put CMYK then duplex it and do the CMYK on the other side.
Those are primarily the run through of the actual press. The reasons that you will use digital and that there’s have been such fast profit in digital is that you can do ultra low quantities. We print as few as one, or five or ten on up to, usually the maximum run like for us on the digital color would be in the neighborhood of a thousand or two thousand sheets; but again it’s really made for ultra low run type quantities at very affordable costs. The reason for that is that basically we take a file, rip it and its put right into the press and there is no plate or material as there is in offset, so you don’t have color registration, you don’t have to get up to color, basically the first sheet out of the press is going to be in register and is going to be representing all the color that you get on the job.
That is one of the reason that we do. The other is that it is very fast. Let’s said that you are going to a trade show, had an airplane flight that afternoon and you needed something to hand up, this give you the availability of actually bringing a disk in in the morning and walking out that afternoon or even an hour later with actual printing pieces.
When it comes down at the end of the press, it’s actually ready to be trim, score, folded, bind in any form of fashion that we wanna do and that’s one of the biggest advantages on digital printing is on quick term time situation you can have the availability of doing that while in offset you are more in the situation where you have to go through [...] , make plates; make register and then all the finishing is all flying. It’s usually something that you are gonna have to take care on offset where as you may not on digital.
The other advantage of the Indigo 3050 or other digital color presses is it has the availability of doing variable data. Variable data would be as from one sheet to the next either text changes, pictures changes, graphics or some variability on the sheet will change. This is done by taking an artwork and then applying a database to that artwork so that each variability can change. If it’s the name, where the first brochure will said Dear Jane the second brochure will said Dear Kathy, that’s variable data. You also have the availability of changing [...] pictures.
Limitations on Digital Color Printing: This press right here, maximum sheets size is 12 by 18 or maximum imagery is somewhere in the neighborhood or 11,5 by 17,2; that’s also gonna include any bleed that you got into, in the job, so for the most part, what we would do here is finished sheet size on somewhere around 11 by 17 while on offset we have sheet sizes up to 28 inches by 40 inches so that’s definitely one limitation that you have on this press.
The other limitation that you’ll have is as your quantities go higher in digital printing, your cost, your per piece price is not drop nearly as dramatically as offset printing. On offset printing, as you go up to five, ten, twenty thousand, fifty thousand type of quantities you are gonna have a continuation on per piece drop in prices where on digital is going to become flatter at a much earlier quantity.
The types of products that you can print on this digital color press. Pretty much anything you can do on offset, you can do brochures, postcards, pocket folders if it’s fit on a 12 by 18 sheet, sales catalogues, pretty much any printing product that you wanna do, catalogues, you can print on a digital press. You are just doing it from the start point of something that you usually need quickly and usually need a small quantity of.
I hope this has been informative. You can reach us on the internet at www.odeecompany.com.
