By:Nandagopal Rajan
Printing has had limitations of scale ever since mechanical printing was invented. Now, however, digital printing is changing all that.
How else could a million customers of Diet Coke get customised bottles, all with different patterns, no two alike. That is where HP Indigo Printers are changing the printing business. With these printers changes can be made on the fly, negating the need for minimum print runs or plate changes.
No wonder Diet Coke ran another campaign where they had the customer’s name on each bottle.
In China, now it is a big thing for personal messages to be printed on condom packets. And it is again the same technology.
In UK, this technology is used to do more useful stuff like printing the headlines on bread packets.
Such printing was impossible when the only option was traditional methods life offset printing. But if you are printing smaller runs, like labels on wine bottles, often just a few thousands, it is not very viable.
Roy Eitan, Director & General Manager for the Indigo vertical of HP says digital printing is changing the equation. He says HP creates the printers as well as the software Mosaic that helps create the millions of patterns used on the Diet Coke shrink sleeves. With digital printing you don’t need to changing anything to print something new on every second unit. And it does not cost too much extra either.
“The traditional form of printing is better when you have long print runs. But digital is the only option when the print runs are small, like when printing a few thousand wine labels or a special edition box for a product. But it also lets you do things like adding the buyer’s name to the wine label or customising a storybook with the name of the child it is being gifted to,” he explains at the HP GSB Centre of Excellence where customers get to experience printing solutions and customise it for their needs.