InfoTrends’ Survey on Digital and Conventional Printing

Based on the survey's smaller sample of digital press users (in the case of flexible packaging converters, just 14 respondents), the results shown in Figure 2, again for total responses, show the top concerns to be total cost operation, press reliability, and spot colors. "High numbers of short runs" and "Job changeover time," two leading causes of concern for conventional presses, were also response options for this question, but these concerns rank much lower for digital presses than for conventional ones. That result reflects digital presses' abilities to print short runs easily and to changing jobs quickly. In practice, we learned from interviews that high numbers of short runs can in fact be tedious even for digital presses, and that good workflow tools are valued about equally by users of digital and conventional presses as a result.