Virginia Printing Company Diversifies Printing from Paper to Various Other Materials

A printing company Washington, DC has gone digital which could mean one of several things. But seeing as they are printing company, it must mean that they have purchased a new color digital printer.

When someone says digital printers, most people think of inkjet printers or desktop laser printers people use to make hard copies of images and text from personal home computers.  However the digital color printers used by commercial printing companies hardly bear any resemblance to the small devices used at home or even the somewhat larger ones used in offices around the country. Although the underlying technology may be based on the same principles, the industrial heavyweights of digital printers can measure up to 60 feet long and costs upwards of $750,000 or more.

There are two special characteristics about color digital printers, whether they are big or small, and one is that they do not have to print thousands of identical copies of the same likeness, text or illustration; the impression made on consecutive sheets of paper can be  entirely different.  This allows publishers and print company customers to customize output for individual markets.  For example if you have a catalog, each individual catalog could be printed with the name and address of every customer in a client’s database.

The second characteristic is that unlike wet ink used in traditional printing presses, the toners in digital color printers don’t get absorbed into the paper; what they do is form a layer on the surface instead.  This means there is no ink bleeding, images remained crisp and clear, especially around the edges.  And according to a Virginia printing company, because the ink does not pierce the surface, a print company could print on countless different types of material – from plastics, like DVDs and CDs packages to metal foils such as delicate stamps or fabrics like T-shirts and baseball caps.

Of course there is a downside to digital color printing. The cost per page is basically fixed instead of dropping with the number of copies made.  In the past, that would have restricted digital color printing to short runs.