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Heidelberg Quickmaster 46-4 DI
Deutsche Drucker published Andrew Tribute's contention that Direct Imaging has had its day. Consultant Kurt Wolf responded to the argument
After Ipex I was not positive about DI printing (www.attributes.co.uk), and have received some interesting responses. I thought it would be a good idea to revisit this subject and see perhaps if my ideas were wrong.
DI, or Direct Imaging printing is a development that came jointly from Heidelberg and Presstek early in the 1990s. The idea of DI is to have the digital platemaking operation as an integral operation on the press, rather than being a separate prepress step.
The first implementation of DI on a GTO was very limited with poor quality. It was not, however, until 1995 at Drupa that Heidelberg and Presstek really made DI a key product with the introduction of the Heidelberg Quickmaster 46-4 DI. This was the first press built specifically for the DI process, rather than adding plate imaging to an existing press.
At Drupa 95, the QM 46-4 DI immediately attracted attention alongside digital colour printing which was available for the first time with Indigo and Xeikon.
My belief is that many printers found digital printing with toners rather than ink a difficult concept, and quality was limited, but they could understand taking digital input into an offset press.
A base of a little over 2,000
Since 1995 other suppliers have brought out DI presses: Adast; KBA; and Heidelberg with the Speedmaster 74 DI. And more recently Komori, Ryobi and Sakurai. Despite all this activity over the past seven years, we still have an installed base from all suppliers of a little over 2,000 units. This cannot be considered a success. In that time the likes of Indigo, Xeikon and Xerox have installed well over 10,000 digital colour presses. My view of DI is that it is a technology that has had its time. I believe that DI was ideal from the time it came out in 1995 to around now, 2002. I believe it fitted a market slot that has now been eroded. That was short run colour printing of run lengths from around 250 copies up to 20,000 copies. It came out at a time when digital workflows were...