Digital Monochrome: Keep Your Business In The Black

Eric Staples, InfoPrint Solutions, Product Manager, Light Production Cutsheet Solutions
I think the most important thing the Quick Printing audience should know is how to [differentiate their services]. They can’t do that with an offset device. They can probably do it with any digital device as long as they buy one of the latest. But if they want to simply get a digital device to handle requests that they can’t do on traditional offset, then they’re really waiting for a commodity type customer to come in and say, “I need to get this digital job run. Can you help me?” And that customer may be price shopping between different quick printers. But if they can start to learn the techniques and use the tools to help manage the customer’s job and leverage the customer’s content in different ways, whether it’s what’s printed or what’s tracked after it’s printed—measuring results of campaigns, tracking the responses, and mining data—that’s where the digital device can become a real tool.

Bob Schalberg, Kodak, Director Current Product Marketing B&W
There are opportunities in the marketplace today to do things differently, to do things more effectively, to look at consolidation of floor space, and to truly look at the total cost of ownership of digital devices. Weigh in the skill set necessary to run the equipment, the amount of floor space these take up, the variability of output that you can achieve through a high speed digital monochrome press. Those are the types of things that, as a business person looks to make a capital acquisition, they need to consider.

Also, look at the support from the manufacturer because that is an integral part of the solution set that’s offered. And that support is not defined only as “screwdriver time.” That support is described as prepress, working with the printer to understand that they have the appropriate workflow, and to accommodate existing workflows in a printing environment, as well as to make sure that the equipment is maintained and runs as reliably as it is capable of running. So there’s a great deal of importance in the vendor that you pick and it’s very important to look at their pre-, current, and post sale support collectively.

To read the complete interviews with all of the industry representatives, please visit www.quickprinting.com and read our Web Exclusive “The Monochrome Monologues.”