Digital printing first became an option in the early 1990s when digital printing legend Benny Landa developed the very first digital colour printer and wowed industry experts alike at the IPEX in 1993. Benny Landa, who holds more than 800 patents to his name, showed how the world would not have to rely anymore upon the traditional method of printing which has been around in some form from as early as the year 1439. The new technology made the availability of Digital Prints London a reality from that date onwards.
Digital printing itself is a process where an electronic file, such as a pdf (portable document format) is sent to a connected printing device from a computer, opened, read, understood and relayed onto paper. Using CMYK colour bands and other specific metallic colours, digital printers can these days replicated the most complex Pantone colours in existence.
So, what are the advantages of digital prints London over traditional prints London? To answer that we must also look at the limitations that a more traditional printing method created. Before the advent of digital printing in London, if you wanted some documents printed you would first have to make heavy, time-consuming, expensive metal plates up with your message on them. These took many man-hours to create and as such made any short-run printing requirement too expensive to carry out, it also meant that if you wanted to change anything on the document you would need to build more plates, even if it was just for a very simple word or date change. It meant that future printing methods available such as variable data printing just were not available before digital printing became the dominant way to produce your documents. It also meant that if you wanted a colour document printed in the old offset way then you would need 4 different plates made up for each colour, CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow and black, I don’t know why black is denoted as K either by the way. However, as this article is an informative piece of work it would be remiss of me to not go and find out.
Right, the K actually stands for “Key” as in Key colour, but this is always black in this type of printing so that’s why it stands for K.
So, the limitations of offset printing were the inability to create short-run prints cost-effectively, limitations as to what material you can print onto as the press itself could only fit certain thicknesses of paper and card and the time a printer would need to spend setting up a printing job thus making quick turnarounds impossible. Therefore, a new invention such as a digital way of printing needed to address these issues to be of any use. Thank goodness it did otherwise this article would be worthless, and I would have wasted my time.
Digital printing has revolutionised the digital print London marketplace. With digital printing you can now print short runs as low as one document cost-effectively, you can produce documents so quickly that the quick turnaround of printing jobs is now the standard, and you can print onto almost any type of material you want to. The quality too is now up to the standard required for 99% of all printing requirements. For things such as short-run business cards, if you are not 100% sure about who you have just hired, posters, flyers, brochures, bespoke calendars, variable data printing to mailshot and market thousands of people whilst only having one master document to create, not to mention all the different types of material now able to have your own bespoke designs on them at the click of a button. Digital printing in London has never been so easy, cost-effective and accessible to all. With most jobs available the very same day it makes a mockery of the older traditional offset printing methods.
There is a warning, however, that is if you want longer printing runs of documents then digital printing can start to become the more expensive option and even though some of the expense can be offset, if you excuse the pun, by the use of the newer technologies available, if you are just after basic long-run printing such as magazines and books then Lithographic printing still is the way to go. For all other printing in London though choose digital printing and you will not be let down. Thanks very much for reading our article today on digital prints in London.