In 1994, Xeikon, Indigo, and Agfa launched the first generation of fully digital, four-color, on-demand high-speed presses. Scitex’s Spontane, IBM’s InfoColor, Xerox’s DocuColor, and others soon followed. What was going to happen to offset printing — an industry already battered by two decades of technical and economic upheaval?
Mike Chiricuzio, general manager of Heritage Graphics’ Sequel Division, was clear: “Digital printing does not take anything away from offset. To some extent it complements it. Having an Indigo press lets us offer more services to our customers.”
High-speed on-demand color printing was clearly going to bring permanent change. What kind of change remained — and remains — disputed. Would digital open a gap in offset’s market share? How much business would migrate? Who would own the equipment — commercial printers choosing between Komoris and Heidelbergs, or prepress bureaus buying large-format color printers?
The Optimistic View
Digital press vendors naturally positioned their machines as a technology wave that would grow the pie rather than shrink it. Digital presses let customers deploy color in applications where they were previously uncertain the investment was justified — print runs under 100 copies, but with quality far beyond color copier output.
By 1997, four years after the first installations in North America, the technology had achieved undeniable success — though quantifying it was nearly impossible. The National Association of Printers and Lithographers reported that the print market grew by no less than 4% in the first half of 1997 compared to the same period a year earlier. Yet there was still no standalone “digital printing” category in industry statistics.
Andrew Paparozzi of the NAPL Economic Research Center described it precisely: “It is sometimes a complement to traditional printing, and sometimes it is a powerful competitor.”
The Pessimistic View
Others were less sanguine. The capital cost of digital presses was high, and the economics required them to run constantly to recover the investment. Was there enough short-run color demand to service the debt? The skeptics argued that digital presses should stop trying to shift work in the 1,000-impression range — even though that sweet spot was highly profitable for early adopters — because the true market volume had not yet materialized.
Even companies that had installed digital presses found it hard to measure their impact. Short-run and short-cycle printing demand fluctuated wildly month to month. Mark Fleming, an industry consultant at Strategies On Demand who had tracked on-demand color from the beginning, observed: “Companies in North America with Xeikon and Indigo presses are not running high volumes.” Most monochrome printing had already migrated to digital processes. Most color had not.
Fleming’s research placed the 1996 U.S. on-demand printing market at $10.1 million, with electronic color separation at $3.6 million. He projected the total on-demand market would reach $17.7 million by 2001 — growth, but not a revolution. He was blunt: “No matter what you do, the total volume of printing does not change. It is only influenced by the economy.” By that logic, any volume created by ultra-short-run digital printing was, somewhere, volume subtracted from offset.
Voices From the Shop Floor
Bob Sacco, Lexington Press (Lexington, MA): Sacco ran both a Heidelberg GTO-DI four-color press and an Indigo E-Print 1000. Lexington bought their digital press in 1995 — the first company in North America to do so. “It is a supplement to traditional printing,” Sacco said. He confirmed that Indigo provided short-run color capabilities that neither his offset equipment nor his Heidelberg ever had. Mixing digital with conventional created new products: small manuals, instruction booklets, bid documents, and print runs from 10 to 100 copies. “Our customer traffic has surged since we went digital. We are now doing color work for every tier of the market. Five years ago, producing a manual of this quality was impossible.”
Skip Dyer, Graphic Express (Boston): Graphic Express bought an Agfa Chromapress in August 1995. Dyer described digital as “another service for customers — one that responds quickly to other needs.” He saw digital as complementary, not replacement. “We developed this new market to attract new customers with new technology.”
Craig Gagliano, DigitalDirect / St. Joseph (Toronto): “There are many resources allocated to digital applications, but there has not yet been a real conversion between trends and traditional printing. They are still new trends.” DigitalDirect used IBM’s InfoColor system and had recently installed a Heidelberg Quickmaster DI press.
Mary-Lee Schneider, R.R. Donnelley: “Digital presses have not reduced traditional offset work. Our impression is the opposite — it replaces traditional printing.” Donnelley, a major web printer, produced large volumes of digital color for direct mail, catalogs, and targeted advertising for HMOs and healthcare organizations. Schneider explained: “Before we had digital presses, we did not do short-run color at all. Digital opened a new market for us.” A critical insight: most digital print buyers were not primarily motivated by short-run economics. They were driven by time — by deadlines that made offset turnaround impossible.
Variable Data: The Promise on the Horizon
Variable data printing was, in the late 1990s, the great unrealized promise of digital. When digital presses appeared in 1994, no software genuinely handled variable data production. By 1997, Agfa, Indigo, Scitex, Barco, Xeikon, Varis, Atlas Software, and ColorAge’s DocuPress had entered the variable data market. Personalized printing promised to be the killer application — but it required enormous data processing capacity and well-structured databases. As Bob Sacco put it: “Right now, most variable data output depends on the customer’s database. If one comma is in the wrong place, you lose the entire process.”
R.R. Donnelley’s variable imaging capability was, at the time, strictly limited to monochrome text changes within a full-color page layout. Full-page variable color was not yet operational at production scale. DigitalDirect had successfully used IBM’s InfoColor for full-color variable work — but only infrequently, typically for very short-run personalized communications and prepress proofs.
Attracting New Customers
Digital presses turned out to be powerful customer-acquisition tools. Once a printer installed one, daily inquiries poured in. Sacco at Lexington noted: “Sometimes customers do not understand what a true short run is. They ask us to print 2,000 copies on the Indigo — work that belongs on an offset press. We show them both prices and let them see the difference.”
Joel Hoefle, manager of Digital Marketing (a Miner Group division in Minneapolis that installed an Indigo E-Print in 1995), observed: “It strengthened and expanded the boundary line of traditional offset work. We acquired new digital print customers who then asked us about catalog printing.” Digital Marketing captured the work and routed it to the Miner Group division that specialized in catalogs — or wherever the customer needed it to go.
The customer overlap told the real story. Digital printers served two customer types: those needing traditional offset and those needing digital — short runs, fast turnaround, or variable imaging. The overlap between these groups — how many customers used both — was the best indicator of whether digital was cannibalizing offset or expanding the total addressable market. Hoefle said: “We try to keep that overlap as high as possible, around 80 to 90 percent. We want to sell as many of our services as possible to Miner Group’s existing customers. If we do not, someone else will.”
The Bottom Line
The boundary between offset and digital was — and remains — blurry. The decision between the two technologies does not reduce to a simple quantity threshold. It also depends on turnaround time, job complexity, whether variable imaging is involved, the production workflow, and the skill requirements of different press crews. As Gagliano put it: “I have not seen a conversion from traditional printing to a new technology. The change has happened in a few steps, in the design process. Customers are looking at their own objectives and specifying strategies accordingly.”
Short-run on-demand color digital printing was a long-gestation technology. By the late 1990s, it had begun to be accepted by both printing and prepress firms — but commercial printers appeared to be the more successful adopters. The real answer to “offset versus digital” was never one replacing the other. It was — as it still is — about having both and knowing when to use which.
References
- Wikipedia: Digital Printing: Overview of digital printing technology, history, and comparison with traditional offset processes.
- Wikipedia: Offset Lithography: Foundational explanation of offset printing technology, its economics, and its position in the modern print industry.
- Wikipedia: Variable Data Printing: Technical description of VDP technology, database-driven personalization, and its role in digital print differentiation.
- Wikipedia: Print on Demand: History and economics of on-demand printing, including market size projections and technology adoption curves.
- Wikipedia: HP Indigo: History of the Indigo digital press — one of the first commercial digital color presses — and its impact on the printing industry.