The phrase “Digital Printing” is used by many companies, from manufacturers of printing and copying equipment, to the companies that manufacture printing products, to the end user. It is such a broad, general term that I think it gets misused probably more than it is used correctly.

Digital Printing
So we could really disect this phrase into two parts and get the technical defintion of it, yes? Well, without going into a dictionary, we know that “digital” means not analog - comprised of 1’s and 0’s. Something in a digital format usually means that it can be transfered onto and out of a computer or any manner of other “digital” devices. CD’s are digital, cassette tapes are analog.

Printing is printing, right? I mean, could Xerox call their equipment “printing machines”? Would they want to? Printing really means a transfer of images and/or text by a mechanical process. So the term printing is pretty wide open.

The Bumpy Ride to Digital

In relation to traditional printing, which is a very analog process, there are a few levels of digital-ness. First, along came the Mac Plus. Instead of physically typesetting brochures, letterheads and the like (originally wood type), an operator would sit in front of a green computer screen, hammering out the next set of stationery for Al Gore. When you were satisfied with the text, it would spit out some printing material. But, you still had to shoot it with a camera, to make film, to make plates. It took a while, but soon you could simply send the information into the plate maker, eliminating the need for space hungry graphic arts cameras, processing rooms, vaccum tables, etc. About the same time, the figured “well if we can print it onto a plate, lets make it print it onto a plate while the plate is on the press.” True digital printing was born, most successfully the Heidelberg Quickmaster DI which uses a waterless inking system, special plates that are retained inside the press, a make-ready of about 12 minutes, and the possibility of true short-run digital offset printing.