Postfully Yours

Digital print technology is rapidly maturing. While drupa continues to demonstrate the huge range of existing print methods and technologies (and cool new ones), calling this the digital drupa is not an exaggeration.

Which makes it important to look at the three pieces needed for this transition to truly take hold.

• Digital presses and finishing equipment
• Software and processing
• Integration with digital information and sources

While the first (presses and equipment) is maturing, the other two have a long ways to go.

Production Equipment

This is where we’ve seen the most advancement. In terms of presses, existing offerings already approach or exceed the level of offset while offering complete per piece variability. New offerings from HP, Xerox, and Kodak (among others) largely refine what is available now rather than reinventing the space. Which is a good move given that the major weakness of past offerings has been reliability.

Finishing equipment is still a few steps behind. Specifically, the ability to dynamically produce, insert, and verify single mailings is in its early stages. Companies like Kern, Megaspirea, and Entremedia are developing equipment and methods to handle these challenges, but there remains room for growth, particularly on end-to-end integration.

Software and Processing

Software is slowly catching up to the capabilities of the presses. There’s still a tentative aspect to these packages, recreating old processes with new capabilities tacked on. New releases of Darwin and XMPie improve this, but don’t completely change it.

Unfortunately, RIPs are still buckling under the load of even moderate image variability. Stringing together multiple boxes is the only option for shops seriously attempting this. This challenge is recognized and a mix of strategies are developing. With new releases from most major vendors, it will be interesting to see the results as benchmarks become available.

Integration

Here, we’ve barely begun to even understand the possibilities. There are two sides to this.

The first is understanding the new types of print that these technologies make possible. What are the things that we couldn’t do before? The personalization that’s being attempted has barely advanced beyond the “Hello <your name here>” phase.

The second is integration with available data sources. How do you obtain information from individuals (photos, interests, events, etc)? How do you integrate major web data sources (maps, images, interactions)? Web integration is the key to this. Increasingly, information is channeled through the web, regardless of the source. Print must tap into that and stand as an output format for that information rather than trying to build a parallel communications world.

Conclusion

While the focus for now is on the machines, software, and systems needed to complete the integration process, the interesting part remains the question of how to take advantage of these systems. While this may be the digital drupa, the next will be all about integration.