Digital vs. Offset Printing

Well, it’s not so much a battle — digital vs. offset — as an ongoing coupling of new and old technology. The print industry hurries along just like any industry that both relies
You can find extensive discussions, debates, and diatribes online about the superiority of one over the other, but you can also find considered analyses that
Budget Printing houses both digital and
Offset
Printing presses have been in use for hundreds of years, firstly to reproduce books (instead of individually by hand) and on through to our modern world of literature, marketing material, stationery, etc. For the most part, this is an ink-based system using printing plates to translate a design onto sheets or rolls of paper.
Pros
Cons
Spot Colour Offset Printing
Printing with one or two inks (
Full (Process) Colour Offset Printing
Depending on the amount of
Digital
Almost everyone has a computer and a printer. Going directly from computer screen to printed page is not a new invention, but for high-end and high-volume production, a print facility requires a special breed of digital device.
Pros
Cons
Black-and-White (Monotone) Copying
The classic photocopier continues to evolve, now capable of huge volumes in a short time, and with such features as stapling, collating, folding, and more. Production machines (unlike standard office copiers) can be used for a variety of print jobs, such as documents, multipart forms, even some business cards. The speed of these machines, along with their evolution into robust production systems, allows a print shop to offer fast, quality runs on everything from a simple photocopy to large, tabbed binders, and more.
Digital Colour Printing
Laser printing is one of the most rapidly evolving print systems. Much of the focus is on making high-end production machines that rival the strengths of offset printing (as described above). Computer-driven, this technology especially offers the ability to customize every copy of a print job (such as with a unique name, an evolving marketing approach); this would be an unreasonably expensive and complicated achievement on a traditional press.
Summary
The above is