A crucial question for creative professionals: Is digital printing as good as offset printing?
Certification assures stability of printing processes.
Advertisers and agencies have long pondered a key question: Is the quality of digital printing sufficient for my print projects? In the past, offset printing was generally considered superior in terms of quality. But digital printing has caught up. Thanks to certifications, even experts are no longer able to tell the difference between print results.
Gone are the times when marketing professionals and advertising agencies ordered millions of copies of printed material. Instead, Onlineprinters customers put smaller quantities into their shopping carts and reorder them on short notice as needed. "Since the triumphant advance of the internet, we expect all information media to be up-to-date at all times and printed promotional material is no exception. This affects the buying behaviour of our customers who order business cards, flyers, brochures or promotional items around the clock also in very small quantities. The cost-effective production of small print runs is one challenge – another challenge is to get the quality right," Roland Keppler sums up what many print companies are concerned with. He is the CEO of the Onlineprinters Group which operates across Europe.
Digital printing gains importance
Onlineprinters uses both offset and digital printing machines with digital printing having clearly gained in popularity. Today, Onlineprinters produces almost 25 percent of customer jobs digitally compared to just five percent in 2014. Investments in the digital printing infrastructure have steadily increased over the past years. "Industrial-scale digital printing equipment easily costs seven-digit amounts and is about as large as a van. There is of course a huge difference between these state-of-the-art digital presses and your standard office printer not just in terms of size. Also the print result is completely different," Onlineprinters CEO Keppler explains. The company is the first online printer in Europe to have all three departments certified: offset printing (ISO 12647-2) post-press (ISO 16762) and recently digital printing (ISO 15311). The latter has just been certified according to ProcessStandard Digital (PSD).
Unique in Europe: quality hat-trick
During the PSD audit, the print result is compared to standardised ISO printing and proofing conditions: Deviations are analysed using cutting-edge measuring technology pursuant to standards. "The measurements help control processes and assure quality. They correlate well with the perception of the human eye," says Thomas M. Schnitzler from CtP & Print QualityControl, who is also a Fogra Digital Print Expert and he adds: "Today, it's all but impossible even for a trained professional to tell the difference between offset and digital print results. Both printing methods equally produce high-quality results provided that the processes are perfectly fine-tuned and certified as Onlineprinters has done. My visual and metrological inspections of the digital print results scored the best possible PSD quality level in the PSD audit."Im Juni 2019 erhielt Onlineprinters das PSD-Digitaldrucksiegel nach den Anforderungen des ProzessStandard Digitaldruck und der Digitaldrucknorm ISO 15311. Das dazugehörige Qualitätsmanagement umfasst alle qualitätssichernden und organisierten Maßnahmen im Digitaldruck, die der Verbesserung von Produkten, Prozessen oder Leistungen dienen. „Wenn man online Druckprodukte kauft, muss man sicher sein können, dass die Qualität stimmt. Bei Onlineprinters können wir das garantieren“, so CEO Roland Keppler.
Press contact:Patrick Piecha
Head of Press & Public Relations
press@onlineprinters.com
Tel.: +49 9161 6209807