Shelf Space: Déjà Vu All Over Again

It was—gasp—22 years ago when the first Indigo and Xeikon presses were rolled out at IPEX in Birmingham, England. The hype du jour was that digital printing was going to grow rapidly and dominate the commercial printing market. But it did not and has not. Still, digital presses have become commonplace in many commercial print shops and even spawned some that are all digital all the time. Now we see digital presses becoming business as usual among label printers and converters, too. Which is a good thing for converters and their customers alike.

In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, then director of MIT’s Media Lab, wrote Being Digital, in which he noted that “everything that can become digital will become digital.” Witness the growth of IoT, aka, the Internet of Things, in which you can adjust your house’s thermostat from your office, unlock your front door with your phone, or use that same phone to view all the security cameras in your home or business—from vacation. Digital is here to stay.

Now consider that more than half of all label printers in North America have at least one digital press. Those machines are being used to meet the needs of the brand owners who are driving SKU expansion, seeking to target specific audiences, reduce inventory levels, and trying to grow market share every way possible. Physical products and packaging won’t be digitized, but many labels and packages are already printed via a stream of ones and zeros and more will follow. Still, it’s not easy.

One initial barrier for digital presses initially was print quality, but as I talk with converters running inkjet or toner-based label presses, they tell me quality is largely a non-issue. For most jobs, they tell me, well-run digital presses deliver better quality than a flexo press, although they admit to still needing a flexo press to hit some spot colors. For the most part, though, press type is not usually a topic of discussion with customers, and more than a few converters simply run jobs on whatever press is available. And increasingly, many don’t differentiate price at all, which makes sense given the shorter set-up and makeready times associated with digital presses.

Another barrier is speed. Digital presses are slower  but the gap is narrowing, with some new inkjet machines capable of up to 250 feet per minute. While still shy of the fastest flexo speeds, converters using analog and digital machines admit that the increase in short runs have sharply reduced the effective speeds of many flexo presses to well under 200 fpm (largely depending on number of changeovers), so some digital presses can actually have higher effective throughput despite their lower speeds.

Then there’s the range of jobs digital presses can handle. There are still limitations in print width and substrates, but these are changing, too. Wider machines are already reaching the market for labels, flexible packaging, folding cartons, and even corrugated. It’s back to what Negroponte said, “what can become digital, will become digital.”

Digital presses are never going to replace their flexo, gravure, or offset counterparts, but their advantages are too great to ignore. While not right for every converter, they can provide new ways to meet customer needs, grow business, and seek out new opportunities. And just as in commercial printing, digital printing for packaging is slowly taking its place along side conventional presses, and generating revenue. It’s déjà vu all over again.