I am currently reassessing the relationship between digital and litho printing. Two interesting reports, one from Gartner and one from Infotrends, have recently been released on the position of digital printing compared with offset printing.
I also received some interesting data from vice president and general manager of the HP Indigo Press division Alon Bar-Shany that looked at the sales of offset and high-end digital presses. The figures show estimated sales in the different parts of the world for B1-, B2- and B3-format offset presses and for high-end digital presses.
These figures show the major market for offset presses is the rest of the world (ROW) – ie not North America, Europe or the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). It also shows that digital press sales were high in both EMEA and North America, but relatively low in ROW.
It may be that both North America and Europe have reached a high saturation level of modern offset presses based upon the substantial contraction of the printing industry in those areas, whereas the ROW areas are still expanding their traditional print markets. The ROW figures may also be skewed when one takes account of the large number of used presses that are sold in this area.
Digital dominance
The figures given by HP only cover the top of the market. If one were to extend these figures to cover the mid-range digital presses, with duty cycles between 300,000 and one million that predominantly sell into the graphic arts markets, then the volume of digital presses increases substantially. These products tend to sell at least double the volume of the high-end presses.
In 2007, Infotrends research showed sales of 2,572 such units in US and Europe. On that basis, I’d estimate that 2008 sales for such products would be 3,500 units and this would make the total sales of digital presses predominantly sold to graphic arts markets in 2008 to be in excess of 5,000 units.
Extrapolating these figures further, one could estimate that the total money spent on digital presses by the graphic arts markets in 2008 exceeded that spent on offset presses. If that is the case, then 2008 is a milestone year in the transition to digital printing.
Gartner, a major IT information company, has just completed a study of 443 production print managers in the US, France, Germany, and the UK that provides convincing evidence that, for the first time, long-held preferences for offset printing have been up-ended.
The Gartner study was designed to provide evidence of the perceived differences between the four main printing technologies. The respondents were asked to rate the image quality of different technologies on a scale of 1-7. The results from this showed the following: dry toner 5.68, liquid ink (Indigo) 5.40, inkjet 5.24 and offset 5.17. The study also asked recipients to assess work in terms of value and the results were as follows: toner 5.58, liquid ink 5.29, inkjet 5.23 and offset 5.13. This report shows that digital printing is no longer seen as a poor equivalent of offset printing.
The Infotrends report looked at the comparative costs of digital and offset printing. It analysed a number of different jobs and calculated the total costs of these when printed on a four-colour 74cm press and an HP Indigo 7000 digital press. It calculated the crossover point in terms of run length between the two technologies and the actual time to run the complete jobs.
The overall results showed a saving in time of 30 hours using digital printing. The crossover points where it became more economical to print offset for a specific product ranged from 1,130 copies for a book to 22,000 copies for a postcard.
What these reports show is that digital is taking an increasing share of work away from offset printing – the reduction in time if using digital is a critical factor.
This must all be glum reading for the offset press suppliers. It will get worse as the wider-format colour inkjet presses such as the HP Inkjet Web Press and the forthcoming Kodak Stream press, that are aimed at the graphic arts quality markets, move digital far further into the offset space when they become available next year.
Andrew Tribute is a journalist and consultant in digital and pre-press and pre-media technology. Visit www.attributes.co.uk
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