Digital printing capabilities have grown by leaps and bounds. Today, digital printing can produce top-notch labels. Like all technologies, printing continues to evolve. And, in fact, there was a time when digital printing produced a low-quality product. However, more recently, digital printing has surpassed offset printing as a speedier, cheaper and less-wasteful alternative.
The myth of digital print quality may have originated from poor product examples, mainly those printed on devices that weren’t specifically designed for high-quality output. While small-office and home-office printers are still considered digital, they lack high resolution, and have almost no ability for colour correction or control. Today, new digital technologies produce colour that edges out traditional offset quality, and further gives your company’s product a competitive advantage.
In addition to brilliant colour, digital printing transforms a client’s artwork into a living entity, allowing for both real-time proofing and editing. This means information can be easily added, edited or removed, and colours can be quickly corrected. These are all processes that would take extra days and dollars using traditional offset or flexo printing.
In the world of digital print, the technologies aren’t “one size fits all.” There are significant differences in print output, as a direct result of which technology is used. These include various forms of inkjet, thermography, electrophotography and electrostatic printing, with the two most common technologies being electrophotography and inkjet.
Currently, electrophotography is the market leader; it utilizes either liquid electro-ink (e-ink) or dry toner. Liquid e-ink prints the smallest dots, thereby generating the highest resolution. Further, “one-shot” technology allows for perfect registration and building up to 16 layers of ink. It features seven-colour expanded gamut printing to achieve colour accuracy on more than 90 per cent of Pantone spot colours, while dry toner electrophotography presses are only capable of producing five-colour expanded gamut. The dry toner particles are also larger, which means the resolution is not as high. Its inline print process also means less registration accuracy for high-resolution detail.
The right digital print technology can be equal to (and in many cases superior to) any conventional print method. The best digital print is virtually indistinguishable from conventional print, and that should be the goal. But at the end of the day, brand owners want the best results for their image, regardless of the technology used to print it.
