Today's Digital Duplicators: With new products and markets, the future is bright
By John Reiling
If you asked a print-for-pay business owner or a corporate manager a few years ago whether he had a digital duplicator on hand for business-quality imaging duties, he probably would have said something like this: "No, we really don't. I understand they're fast and dependable, but the print quality just isn't there for the kinds of jobs we're running."
And up to a point, he would have been right. A longtime fixture in schools and church offices, digital duplicators have traditionally been perceived as useful for Sunday service bulletins and cafeteria menus, but not for serious business or organizational printing. For that, the conventional wisdom says, you need to turn to offset or an industrial strength copier.
Until recently, that perception matched the reality. Digital duplicators typically printed in the 200 dots per inch (dpi) range, and finished documents more closely resembled output from old spirit duplicators than the results you would expect from an offset press. Slow-drying inks often produced smeared copies, and feeding mechanisms were not always dependable, especially for heavy paper.
All that is changing now, and the market is beginning to change as well. Today's digital duplicators print at 600 dpi, inks are better than ever and new feeding technology ensures reliable operation, even with NCR paper, heavy stocks and envelopes.
Perhaps most important, today's digital duplicators offer users spot color in documents. In fact, in the case of Ricoh's TC-II production printer, it is possible to print two different spot colors with one pass of the paper through the printer, a huge time-saver and a convenient and inexpensive way to brighten up text documents.
All of these features come with one other big plus: the ability to connect digital duplicators to organizational computer networks. Today, for the first time, users can create documents within word-processing or desktop publishing applications and send them directly to the duplicator for printing.
What all this has meant for the market is that new kinds of customers are beginning to consider and buy digital duplicators for their printing and imaging needs: print-for-pay shops, manufacturing companies, healthcare organizations and direct marketers among them.
To understand where the digital duplicator market is going, let's take a quick refresher course on how they operate. Unlike copiers, which use heat to "melt" an image onto paper, a digital duplicator produces a master from which the image to be duplicated is created. The master is created from an original placed on the digital duplicator's platen or an original that has been downloaded from a computer. The master is then automatically loaded on an inked print cylinder, which produces inexpensive prints at high speed. For the user, it is all seamless - the whole process results from a single control panel command.
So why doesn't everybody with organizational printing needs have a digital duplicator on duty? Many do, of course, but some have been slow to embrace today's models. One reason may be that there is not a clear understanding in the marketplace of what applications make sense for these office workhorses. A professional offset press, which is always run by a skilled, trained (and, therefore, expensive) operator, makes sense for a run of more than several thousand but makes no sense at all when you need a few hundred or even a few thousand copies of a document. And the standard office copier is clearly the choice for a dozen or so copies of a memo. In schools and in many corporate environments, of course, many jobs fall in between those two extremes, and that is where today's digital duplicators come in.
David Strong, a digital duplicator sales rep for ProCopy in Cincinnati, understands the versatility of digital duplicators and sees potential new customers everywhere. "Basically, any organization that runs straightforward fliers or mailer jobs - especially when the volume is too much for an office copier and too little for offset - is a potential digital duplicator customer," he says. "The key for me is to understand their business needs. From there, the product basically sells itself."
Beyond the Traditional Markets
While many of his buyers are traditional duplicator buyers - churches and schools - Strong says he has made a point of prospecting beyond those targets. Take mortgage lenders, for instance. When he learned that a local firm was doing regular mailings of fliers to announce special rates and offerings, he called on the company and found they were wearing out equipment right and left by running the mailers on copiers. A needs analysis and demonstration of a 600-dpi digital duplicator made them believers in relatively short order.
For many of these customers, the combination of low cost and high speed is hard to beat. Digital duplicator output, particularly in longer runs, costs a small fraction of copier output on a per-copy basis. In addition, digital duplicators operate at up to 130 pages per minute, four times as fast the mid-volume convenience copiers that organizations tend to over-use for simple but lengthy document runs. That combination of speed and low cost is difficult to resist.
Increasingly, print-for-pay businesses are becoming receptive customers for digital duplicators. "I know how printers work, and I know how an offset press runs," says Art Post, a long-time digital duplicator sales rep for Century Office Products, Middlesex, N.J. "I have a precise fix on exactly what it costs to make a metal plate on press and the cost of a craftsman for running the press. Knowing what I'm talking about goes a long way toward helping me gain that prospect's trust."
For example, Post knows that a printer does not really begin to make money from press work until the runs are up in the 20,000 to 40,000 sheet range. "The profits are marginal on those smaller jobs of 1,000 and 2,000 sheets," he says. "It takes anywhere from 25-40 minutes to set up the press and make a plate. I've actually worked out a cost justification chart that points out how much those short-run plates are costing."
Post says he is in a good position to do more business with a print-for-pay shop once he has made the digital duplicator sale. "The opportunities are many," he says. "Black and white and high-speed copiers, wide format systems, color copiers and color printers are all strong possibilities in this market. That's why I work so hard on the digital duplicator sale. Occasionally, I'll offer to pick up the first several lease payments just to get the machine placed. I like to ask the question, 'Can we get this digital duplicator in the door and start building up your duplicator business?'"
Whatever the sales rep's approach, it is clear that the future for digital duplicators is bright. New technologies are just around the corner, including even faster-drying inks that allow the systems to print four-color process at 600 dpi, and paper-handling and networking features are improving every year. Whether it is a non-profit organization or a commercial enterprise, groups with imaging needs will always warm to a technology that provides good results quickly and at a low cost. And that's a niche that digital duplicators fit to a tee.
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