No films, no plates. Welcome to Digital Printing. A process of printing digital desired images directly on different materials and substrates. It could be paper, photo paper, canvas, synthetics, fabrics; literally anything counted in the category of a substrate. Long gone are the hassles of transferring the image onto a plate and then onto the rubber blanket, tending to lose out on quality with so much ongoing transferring. With Digital Printing, it is as simple as sending out digital PDFs or other desktop publishing files to the machine and then printing on the substrate.
Over the recent years, the printing industry all over the world has seen the rise of a new technology that is here to make lives easier and processes faster. Surprisingly, people all over the world have been quite welcoming. The mindset was that the ruling commercial printing technology which is offset printing technologies is here to stay and that there is no other printing technology that could even be in close competition to it. It was thought that the mass quantity that the client requires would only be fulfilled by offset machines.
The world has been proved wrong. Manufacturers of digital machines like HP and Konica Minolta have a different story to tell. Digital printing gives more reference to quality than offset printing. Life has actually become much easier in conjunction with digital printing technologies. Quality brochures, leaflets, flyers, business cards, posters, manuals, books, calendars and much more are printed in little time. Not just marketing collateral, it has aced in the categories of photo specialty, folding cartons and flexible packaging too.
With no films or plates involved, the technology is enabled to print in personalized short runs. Imagine you are saved from the hassle of stopping the press whenever there is an emergency correction. You could easily alter text or images without stopping the press. The inks are never the problem, because it is all about liquid electro inks now, with up to seven colour stations of yellow, cyan, black and magenta. It is inclusive of a variety of spot colour inks and other special inks like white, transparent and UV Red.
Smart Printers adopted digital printing back in 2013 with one machine. The focus was mainly to be able to meet the changing Kenyan market demands where many of the customers were now moving into personalized printing and small quantities. More like market segmentation, before printing companies were purely focusing on the mass quantities because they thought that is where the money was. After the introduction of digital technologies, the focus has now been divided into looking at the small quantity customers and personalized printing customers. Within no time, digital machines caught up with the pace of offset in this company, attracting various clients because of personalized printing and now we are proud to say that the company has been provided with that ultimate boost, purely because of our digital machines: 2 HP Digital Indigo machines, 2 HP Flatbed Machines, 5 HP Latex Machines, 2 HP Scitex Machines and many others.
Why HP you ask? Stay tuned for the next blog coming up soon!
