In the last eighteen pandemic blighted months the world has gone digital and the printing industry is no exception. Shopping is now an online activity promoting a parade of couriers to households across the land; meetings and exhibitions are online encounters, badly lit work from homers peering at laptop screens and conversing through inadequate microphones. And print too has gone digital.
Or at least print has moved away from litho. Everyone has a story to tell of the printer that has mothballed a litho press and can handle what trickle of demand there is on a digital box. And this is coming through too in demand for replacement or additional presses. The order books of the digital press suppliers are bulging, the outlook for litho press suppliers rather less auspicious. This is to be expected. At this point the forecast demand for print is uncertain. Investment in a litho press for the next five to seven years is a big ask; investment in a rather less expensive digital press lasting three to five years is much less of a risk.
This did not happen after the financial crash. That occurred in the wake of what will probably be Heidelberg’s best ever year for press sales in 2006-07. Then printers continued to buy litho presses, albeit not in the same ways as before Lehmann Brothers fell apart. Now it is digital presses first. The world has shifted to smaller runs, greater automation in workflows, to reduced overheads and faster turnarounds. In short to less risk Lowering risk is not just about face masks it seems. Almost 30 years after Benny Landa predicted that “everything that can go digital will go digital – and print is no exception” his words are ringing true. His words are reality, not simply because digital can match litho in almost every way, but because of a very nasty bug in the system.
Print cannot escape the flight to digital
In the last eighteen pandemic blighted months the world has gone digital and the printing industry is no exception. Shopping is now an online activity promoting a parade of couriers to households across the land; meetings and exhibitions are online encounters, badly lit work from homers peering at laptop screens and conversing through inadequate microphones. And print too has gone digital.
Or at least print has moved away from litho. Everyone has a story to tell of the printer that has mothballed a litho press and can handle what trickle of demand there is on a digital box. And this is coming through too in demand for replacement or additional presses. The order books of the digital press suppliers are bulging, the outlook for litho press suppliers rather less auspicious. This is to be expected. At this point the forecast demand for print is uncertain. Investment in a litho press for the next five to seven years is a big ask; investment in a rather less expensive digital press lasting three to five years is much less of a risk.
This did not happen after the financial crash. That occurred in the wake of what will probably be Heidelberg’s best ever year for press sales in 2006-07. Then printers continued to buy litho presses, albeit not in the same ways as before Lehmann Brothers fell apart. Now it is digital presses first. The world has shifted to smaller runs, greater automation in workflows, to reduced overheads and faster turnarounds. In short to less risk Lowering risk is not just about face masks it seems. Almost 30 years after Benny Landa predicted that “everything that can go digital will go digital – and print is no exception” his words are ringing true. His words are reality, not simply because digital can match litho in almost every way, but because of a very nasty bug in the system.
Gareth Ward
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