What is Digital Print?

12th November 2019

The word “Digital” in the term Digital Print can be more than a little confusing; digital print doesn’t mean email, websites, blogs, and other online content; digital print is simply sending an electronic document, such as a PDF, to a modern electronic printer which will print out your content.

Digital Printers used by the print industry are industrial sized full colour laser printers. These machines create extremely high quality print that can often be comparable in quality to traditional litho print.

So what advantages does Digital Print bring?

Speed

No, we don’t mean a digital printer can print a million pages faster than a litho printer, it wouldn’t be able to and frankly we’d be a bit silly to suggest it.

Instead we’re talking about setup and turnaround times. There are no plate making stages or printer setups, messing around with inks or waiting for your prints to dry when they come off the printer; with digital print once you’ve created your digital document you can send it to the printer and out it pops ready to go.

Cost Effectiveness on Smaller Print Runs

Making plates and setting up large lithographic printers can be costly; if you’re wanting 500,000 identical prints the cost is spread out and you’ll get a good deal, but what if you want 1,000, or 500, or 100?
For small print runs digital print is your go to guy.

Full Colour Personalisation

Personalisation, or rather data personalisation, is taking information, such as someone’s name or address or favourite food, and using it to change the document being produced.

I’m sure you’ve received a letter or other mail that starts: “Hi, Your Name!”, well that’s personalisation.

You’ve probably noticed though that most of the time “Your Name” is in black and white with the text laser printed onto a mass produced letter or document that was pre-printed on a litho printer.

Using Digital Print a person’s name can appear anywhere in any colour, in any font, at any size; and it’s not just names and it’s not just text.

Digital Print can take any available information and use it to change images, charts, large paragraphs, or the entire page being printed for each individual document being created.

Instead of everyone seeing an image of a family beach holiday in a travel mailing, for example, you might see snowboarders, or a mountain climber, or some friends in a camper, with relevant accompanying text.

You get the idea. That’s Digital Print at work.

Summary

Digital Print is all about sending digital documents to high quality full colour laser printers to get fully personalised print runs quickly at a great price.

Find out how DMP can help you with your next Digital Print job.

Next time, we’ll investigate the kind of mail products you could be using Digital Print to create, and we’ll find out why taking advantage of Digital Print can help your business grow.