More than 400 print and procurement managers in the UK, Germany, France and the US were recently asked the above question by IT research company Gartner. The responses indicated that digital delivers both better image quality and better value for money. On a scale of 1 ‘poor quality’ to 7 ‘excellent quality’ toner-based digital scored an average of 5.68 with offset the lowest at 5.17.
What does this mean for annual report printing?
Quality
In Australia, the last few years has seen digital printing become a serious contender in the print quality stakes. As regards annual report printing however, with my hand held firmly on my heart, in my own experience it has not yet beaten litho on quality bu is getting close. There are special considerations when designing for digital printing. It does not like large areas of solid or tinted colour, otherwise ‘banding’ will result. Even the mighty iGen3 press from Fuji Xerox, something of an industry standard in Australia, hasn’t found an answer to this achilles heel of digital printing. Overall however, quality is to a very good commercial standard. I estimate that if you took them to task, more than 50% of investor relations professionals would not be able to identify any real quality differences.
Value for money
Digital beats litho on price if you are printing less than around 300 full colour annual reports. Above 300 quantity, there are litho printers in Sydney who can easily better the digital price. Above 1,000 quantity, digital is not in the running.
Where digital really scores is when a reprint is required. Perhaps the share registry underestimated the quantity of reports and you suddenly need another 200 urgently. Reprinting this quantity litho is a very expensive exercise. It takes a lot of time to set up a litho press and get the job ready, where printing plates have to be registered and ink coverage on the paper optimised. It is not unusual for a pallet of paper to be wasted in this process. With digital printing it is a much faster and easier process to reload the files and print 200. And if you select 200 quantity, 200 is what you get, thereby saving a a significant amount of paper.
The future of annual report printing
Legislation in the USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand has made online the default delivery method for annual reports unless shareholders specifically request a hard copy version. This has seen the quantity of printed reports plummet - in Australia by 80-90%. These increasingly small quantities are more and more likely to be printed digitally. It is inevitable that with the R&D funds pouring into it, digital printing or something very similar, will replace litho printing. How many years away is this? Probably quite a few because litho has been around for many years and isn’t going to give up its market share without a big fight.
Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia and joint founder of BrandSynergy in Singapore.
View some of Heywood’s work on www.heywood.com.au
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