Digital printing has actually done a lot to revolutionize our world. I have a great appreciation for this technology which is part of the reason why I chose to work in the industry. So recently I was pleased to head down to a digital printing expo and see some of the latest developments going on there.
If you are not familiar with it, digital printing refers to an important development in the printing industry over the last several decades. Old fashioned printing, from the original printing press up to the middle of the 20th century, used plates with letters on them to ink many pages one after another. This is called analog printing because the letters needed to be set on each place more or less by hand. Only once the letters were positioned and the plates loaded in could the machinery take over.
Digital printing however means that the letters, as they appear on the page, are fed to the machine electronically. Think of an early dot matrix printer – unlike a typewriter, it did not have individual letters striking the page, it could make any letter with a series of dots. Our present day printers like laser printers and ink jet printers are just much more advanced versions of the same.
This development has come with many advances. For example, on demand printing. There used to be a fixed base cost for printing whether you were doing 100 copies or 100,000 because the plates had to be set. With digital printing this is no longer the case. This is why I love digital printing and enjoyed my visit to the digital printing expo.