Effect of Direct Digital Printing on the Demand for Communication Papers, 1996 New Printing Technologies Symposium Proceedings

M. Bruce Lyne

International Paper

While it was common practice to send business correspondence through the post a decade ago, today we are impatient if an E-mail or a fax response is not received the same day. Similar expectations are becoming a reality for turn around times in printing. Just as the rush to provide current information on-demand has made direct digital printing the norm in the office environment, it is also having a profound effect on the printing industry. The advent of digital printing presses that can print acceptable process color directly from an image file at several thousand impressions per hour together with digital prepress, is making the short run market a true print-on-demand business. Perhaps the greatest demand for digital printing comes from market segments where just in time delivery, customization, and distributed printing are of value. Textbooks that are compiled for a particular class and printed on demand at the university bookstore, or direct mail that is customized to suit the profile of each potential customer, or a report that is distributed electronically to an international audience are examples where digital printing is the clear winner. In the case of long print runs, the value of digital printing is diminished since the ease of getting the job to press is dwarfed by the time to print the job. However, in many markets the value of customizing each page can outweigh the extra cost of digitally printing longer runs. Table 1 shows a segmentation of the traditional printing markets with progressively more customization towards the bottom of the table. For example, catalogs can have a custom focus to increase response rate with fewer pages to reduce postage, magazines can contain targeted advertisements, have many different editions, or contain only sections that fit the reader’s profile, and newspaper inserts can be personalized according to the customer’s buying habits (recorded by checkout scanners along with the customer’s identity and demographic information from charge cards or supermarket club discount cards). Deciding on the most effective means of printing a job then becomes an optimization problem with print...