Digital Dynamite : Digital Printing Comes of Age

Digital printing is considered a great, money-saving option for clients with shrinking budgets and short-run print projects. Previously, digital printing has had it’s constraints related to paper size, paper weight, print quality and special effects.  However, things are changing as today’s digital presses offer more features and better print quality. 

Let’s Talk Quality
When it comes to digital presses, the HP Indigo is considered to be the finest due to it’s superior inking.  It uses liquid ink, not a toner.  Therefore, it doesn’t produce a shiny, glazed look that is a dead giveaway for digital reproduction. In contrast, it reproduces a true printing dot. In side-by-side comparisons, people often can’t tell the difference between a sheet printed on the Indigo and the same job printed conventionally. This advantage is unique to the HP Indigo press.

White Ink on Colored Paper
This past summer, UniqueActive became the first commercial printer in the country to install the HP 7500 Indigo press with a White Ink Option. Because the Indigo press has one imaging unit for all colors, printing multiple hits of white is much more practical.

The most obvious thing that white ink allows you to do is to print process colors on colored papers. We can lay down an opaque field of white and then print the colors on top. Another interesting thing that white ink allows you to do, is incorporate the color of the paper into an illustration. For example, an illustration can be created in white and the color of the paper can can come through. There’s actually no printing, just the color of the paper appearing as part of the illustration. We can also use white ink, to bring emphasis to type, illustrations or images. For example, we can create a white outline around a headline to give it extra punch.

Spot Varnishes
Yorke Printe Shoppe has a new digital press they call ICE, which stands for Inline Clear Effects. This press has all the advantages of printing digitally that you would expect from the latest technology, such as enhanced image quality and improved speed, but ICE offers a unique capability that eliminates many of the limitations that we’ve come to associate with digital printing – just by using clear dry ink. The clear ink feature can be used creatively to produce a spot varnish, UV coating, metallic or even security watermark effects. These are all very costly processes when printing on an offset project, but represent only a negligible fee added to an already cost-effective digital run.

Heavier Paper Stocks
ICE represents advances in digital printing in other ways, too. As designers, we have wished we could print postcards or business cards on heavier stock when going the digital route. Yorke’s new press supports paper weights from super light (15# bond) to super heavy (130# cover), as well as uncoated and textured papers. So instead of choosing papers that match the press, we’re free to choose papers that match our creative vision.

Inline Binding
A variety of inline finishing options are available on ICE, including a saddle stitched box fold that automatically adjusts to the thickness of the piece and creates a perfect bound look. Just to emphasize, all of these processes take place inline; they don’t require an extra step or incur additional drying or curing time. The project comes off the press ready to ship.

Putting it to Work
At echo, we’re taking all these new digital printing enhancements and bringing them into our creative process. While they aren’t the fit for every project, they do offer some great new features that we’re excited to implement in 2012. In fact, we already started.

Our holiday card this year was printed on Yorke’s ICE press and featured spot varnishes throughout. This gave the piece that extra punch that was festive and fun. In addition, our capabilities brochure was printed on UniqueActive’s Indigo press.  Color accuracy was vitally important for this piece and Unique/Active’s HP Indigo press and their exceptional prepress skills made it a winning combination. 

If you’d like to learn more about digital printing, please feel free to contact us. We’d love to hear from you!