Editor's note: This article introduces readers to traditional color printing technologies and common output formats, and shows us the magic of emerging markets.

Since the advent of color presses several decades ago, the demand for color documents has been steadily increasing. At the beginning, people only used the color printing technology to print the most important documents, because its cost is relatively high, but with the advancement of printing technology and the enhancement of the general office color printing capabilities, more and more documents were Printed in color. Despite this, we print large amounts of black and white documents every day because they are faster and more cost-effective. Everyone wants to print their own documents with colored inks, but speed and cost issues limit their ability to add color to the document.

The importance of color

Research shows that color can significantly enhance the influence of communication materials, deepen the reader's impression, and influence their choice.

According to research conducted by Pantone, “The number of consumers who can remember words or phrases on color prints is about 78% higher than that of black and white prints. In addition, when colors and texts are combined, it will give readers even stronger results. The impact caused them to pay attention to and recognize printed materials.” The results of other agencies' researches indirectly prove this conclusion. InfoTrends's research found that: color variable data files can effectively enhance customer loyalty, and increase the customer response rate, the number of repeat orders, and the overall revenue of marketing companies by 34%, 48%, and 32%, respectively.

According to color research institutes, as many as 90% of people judge a person, an environment, or an event based on color. From these statistics, it is not difficult to find that color printing technology represents a greater growth opportunity in the color printing market where photocopiers and printers play the leading role. At present, we can produce approximately 42,000 color printing devices and 58 billion pages per year, and these data will continue to grow over the next few years.

Color printing type

In the traditional color market, color printing technology is mainly divided into three categories, they are: production of color, image color and commercial color. This classification is mainly determined by the output requirements of customers. The production of color is suitable for mass production. In this field, higher production speed and lower unit printing cost are very important. Image color jobs must achieve a high level of quality (usually requiring accurate color matching), but the print jobs for such jobs are generally not large. Commercial color is currently one of the fastest growing areas because color files are becoming more and more popular in the office environment. But now, the quality of image colors and the high speed and low cost of producing color have all been weakened to a certain degree, so the differences between various color printing technologies have become less obvious.

None of the traditional technologies can dominate in all the previously mentioned areas. When choosing a technology, a printing company must consider factors such as image quality, output speed, equipment cost and operating cost. Among these factors, print buyers must make trade-offs based on their actual situation. Although different print buyers have different metrics for “acceptable quality,” speed and cost are important factors that motivate them to make purchasing decisions, because high-end printing accounts for only a few of the company's product portfolios. A small proportion.

Production color

Production-type color printing equipment can meet customers' needs for high-volume color output and printing speed. In this area, many devices can easily print millions of pages in a month.

This type of product is generally produced using lithographic or laser printing techniques. In the color production market, there are very few dealers that can provide inkjet printing equipment, and the supply of second-hand offset printing equipment has also appeared to be surplus in the past three years. On the other hand, the advancement of digital color printing technology has made mass production of color documents easier and the threshold for people to enter the color market has become lower. In spite of this, there are still many fields that require the use of color production type color printing equipment, and the price of these devices is still an obstacle to people. Production color printing equipment is generally priced between 100,000 and several million US dollars, and this does not include equipment installation and training costs. Therefore, compared with image color or commercial color imaging systems, such equipment is in the United States. The number of installations in the market is not ideal.

Image color

Image color printing can meet people's demand for short-length high-quality printing; this technology is characterized by higher output quality but slower production speed, which can print about 4 to 50 pages per minute. Image color printing equipment is very simple to set up and operate, and its maintenance features have also become the main reason for its popularity in the color market. However, this area is also facing a lot of confusion: almost every manufacturer of printers and copiers can provide such products for customers. Unlike previous approaches that focused solely on large companies, image color technology has now found its way into homes and many non-profit organizations, government agencies, and small businesses. The main reason for this is that people have realized that color plays an important role in enhancing the influence of printed documents. In fact, color has helped people to attract more customers than before, and successfully offset its production costs.

Commercial color

Commercial color printing is the fastest growing of the three traditional color fields. In fact, with the advancement of traditional copying and printing technologies, commercial color printing has replaced black and white printing in many fields of production. All large copier makers are selling imaging devices capable of both black-and-white printing and color printing. The price of these devices is different because of different functions. In addition, the image quality of these devices can fully meet the requirements of most customers for daily color printing.

Many new devices appearing in the field of commercial color printing have crossed the boundaries between this field and the color and production color printing fields of the image. This chaotic situation is mainly caused by the progress of commercial color printing technology. The pressure on the production color printing technology mainly comes from savvy marketing, not technological progress. Recently, a printer capable of printing up to 65 pages per minute has appeared in the commercial color printing market. Although its output quality is almost the same as that of an image color printing device, its speed cannot be controlled at a speed of 100 pages/minute in any case. The above production-type color printing equipment is comparable. The most attractive aspect of commercial color printing technology is that it can add highlights to the document without significantly increasing production costs. If customers only pursue low cost and do not care about production speed and print quality, commercial color printing is their best choice.

Communication Color: New Opportunities for Color Printing Technology

Recently, color printing technology, which combines low cost and high speed, has found a very promising market. For many printing applications, if you use image color printing equipment with high image quality and single-page printing costs, it will obviously be overkill.

And this mysterious market is the communication color printing market, because the customer's requirement is to communicate more effectively with other people through print, and they only consider the acceptable image quality, higher productivity and reliability, and lower Prices and other factors. Before the advent of fast, low-cost color printing solutions, buyers of printing equipment relied on monochrome imaging solutions to meet their customers' needs because no one color print could match the speed and cost of those monochrome solutions. Communications color printing and creative printing technologies helped us break the deadlock.

to sum up

No matter what kind of color printing technology we choose, we must meet our actual production needs and achieve the right remedy. Only in this way can you maximize the effectiveness of the equipment and technology, otherwise, your huge investment will be lost.