On-demand printing and on-demand publishing How to activate?

Reviewing this year's important exhibition, at the Beijing International Printing Technology Exhibition held in May of this year, the booths for digital printing and related products occupied a large part of the exhibition area, with the same momentum as traditional printing methods. In September, just in September, the four-time exhibitors who once were one of the four major printing exhibitions in the world exhibited in the top 10 or even the top 20 exhibitors in the United States were digital printing and related Suppliers of equipment consumables can barely see offsets at the exhibition site. We do not rule out the reasons why the exhibition itself has become less attractive and the US printing industry is in a sluggish situation. However, digital printing has shocked us a lot.

Digital printing has developed to a certain degree of heat. So many printing companies and publishing companies are just around the corner. To introduce digital devices and develop on-demand publications, let's take a look and print on-demand digital presses, paper, and postpress equipment. What are the new requirements for each part?

Quality is higher and speed is faster

It is precisely because of the characteristics of digital printing that "one print is different from another" makes the concept of on-demand printing put into practice. Today, we assume that there is a future bookstore that can print books on-the-spot according to the needs of readers. Readers can choose an entire book they like, or they can freely choose different chapters from the database according to their own preferences. The new book can be printed on hand after payment of copyright fees has been requested.

We first ask ourselves, what kind of book we want the staff to press the machine button and output? Yes, of course, as before, a well-written, well-made paper book. This requires a digital printing device with a sufficiently high print quality. At the same time, it must be faster and better. Of course, in the bookstore, there will surely be a small number of printed books. Maybe hundreds or even thousands of books. These books may all be former off-line books. They may have serial numbers for each book, or There are other differences. These books also require digital printing. What is needed is a faster industrial digital printing machine.

Quality aspects. From the current situation, digital printing can be said to have been comparable to offset printing quality, especially the quality of black and white digital printing. Various digital printing equipment manufacturers have developed new nozzles, nano-inks, etc. to improve the printing quality. For example, the HP Indigo Digital Press supports a wider range of color gamuts and Pantone-certified precise spot color printing, resulting in a significant increase in print quality; the Fujifilm JetPress 720 can display 4 levels of grayscale at a high resolution of 1200dpi on B2 format sheets. . But objectively speaking, there is still a large distance from offset printing, and color digital printing distance is particularly large. Many printing factory sales staff still recommend offset printing when they receive hundreds of short editions. The main reason is that digital printing quality is still not comparable to offset printing. Of course, not every company has the most advanced digital printing equipment, but for the end customers, the general situation in the industry is the real situation.

Speed. Now, it can be said that the digital printing press has got rid of the shadow of the former "large-scale printer", and the speed of development can be described as rapid progress. For example, the HP Indigo10000 prints 3,450 sheets of B2 format per hour in full-color mode, and speeds up to an hour in the capacity-expanding mode. 4600 B2 format; T410 and T360 inkjet rotary presses print at speeds up to 800 feet per minute in black and white mode. The Kodak Maxim Prosper 6000XL inkjet printing system has a maximum print speed of 133 lines per inch, equivalent to a print speed of 300 meters per minute, and up to 160 million A4 pages per month. In addition, Lanta Nano Technology, which has sensational drupa exhibition, has left people with endless associations.

Better paper adaptability

Regardless of the printing method, the basic requirements for printed materials on paper are nothing more than weight, thickness, brightness, opacity, and smoothness. In these areas, digital printing is no exception.

Digital printing will also have some other requirements for paper: for example, electrostatic digital printers require good dimensional stability, low flexibility, low wrinkling, and appropriate abrasion resistance under conditions of varying temperature and humidity. , surface conductivity, sufficient stiffness, and less paper or dust during the printing process.

Inkjet digital printing is quite different. The liquid properties of the ink used in inkjet technology require surface absorption and absorption of the paper. Therefore, inkjet digital printers have high requirements for surface properties, pore structure, chemical composition, and mechanical properties of the paper.

It may not be possible for some kind of paper to fit all the presses, but if you want to achieve on-demand printing, we need a digital press that can accommodate different papers to the maximum extent possible. Nowadays, many ordinary papers can also be used in digital presses. However, some equipment manufacturers often require paper for digital printing to ensure speed and quality. This undoubtedly limits the material of the book and at the same time cannot be flexibly controlled in terms of cost. This issue is also a stumbling block to the development of on-demand publishing.

Postpress support should keep up

Undoubtedly, digital printing has become a hot spot. In any book, there is no post-press binding. Light has high-quality, high-speed printing equipment. If there is no supporting equipment after printing, on-demand publishing cannot be realized efficiently. Fortunately, in the more general development of digital printing technology, the major digital printing equipment manufacturers began to follow up. Last year's drupa show, MBO and Martini jointly interpret the concept of industrialized on-demand publishing and post-processing. The digitally-printed webs are cut into individual pages and then stacked. Into the book, and enter the binding machine to bind the books in different formats. With the post-press supplement, it can be combined into a truly on-demand publishing line.

At the Beijing International Printing Technology Exhibition in May, digital printing can be described as one of the best, such as Kodak, MBO, precision integrated into a complete on-demand printing solutions, the printing process is completed by Kodak high-speed digital printing equipment, MBO digital finishing production line is completed Folded sheets (collated), precision glue binding equipment to complete the glue binding process, the exhibition site connected to the production of children's books. It is worth mentioning that some page numbers of children's books are designed to tear off individual learning or game content, which is completed by the Dalong line equipment (provided by Tecnau company) in the production line, and the tear-off content is distributed in children. Many pages of the book, and the size of the various formats, domestic equipment is extremely rare, applied in the digital printing process, I am afraid it is the first time.