It is a trend that I am seeing more frequently, that people expect print to be in colour. It has been a slow but inexorable shift that has brought this about, but undeniably the print consumer expects colour for the same or similar cost that used to be baseline black and white print.
We can look to the historical nature that the outstanding capabilities of office-type devices have a tendency to give the overall impression that reproduction in print should be somehow commoditised. In the early days of desktop publishing in the mid 1980s, there was a great deal of debate about the destruction of high-end print planning due to the nature of things being 'so easy on the computer'. It was also common for the vast majority of print communication required by mainstream business to be black and white or two-colour reproduction. Colour was rare and expensive to print, and prior to the computer, it was solely the prerogative of the professional.
There is a discernable pattern to these historical moves of the expectations of the print consumer however: The office/desktop device mandates what the consumer perceives as status quo and what should be a document. I remember the historical precedent that brought it all about; the PostScript laser printer. When people saw the PostScript laser printer, they no longer could look at the result from across the room and say 'It was done on a computer.' Prior to that development, a user could look at the result of a typical office-type environment printer, and say just that. Early computer documents were so obviously a step below the typical status quo of traditional print, that they neither posed any real threat to the art, nor did they serve any practical means to move the bar of what print consumers would expect. The computer served as a convenient, albeit sub-standard form of document production. Print was still a tenured, apprenticed world, where the professionals still maintained dominance in a discerning difference to what can be accomplished in-house, and when to call in the professionals.
The PostScript device, and lower than 300dpi marking engines brought about a 'Hey, I can print myself!' mentality to the print consumer. While some may have seen this shift away from professional print planning to amateurish hacks trying to be printers, others saw it as a new frontier of self-sufficient document production. A large number of office facilities purchased PostScript laser printers as a means for very-short-run production of newsletters and proofs. The desktop publishing movement further empowered the masses with incredibly capable graphic tools, and easy to use applications to allow virtually anyone with a computer to become a 'printer'. Thus spawned an era of bad design, and even worse composition as people whom had no training, or formal business producing high-quality graphics, became 'graphic designers' and 'service bureaus' and opened a new cottage industry; an industry of very poor print production.
Inexact science
Software tools evolved, and so did the devices people had at their disposal. For the first 15 years of the desktop publishing revolution, colour remained the realm of the professional. While computers had gained colour, and the ability to scan it in and manipulate it in photoshop, printing it in-house, in colour, in any volume proved to be a costly, and inexact science. Ink jet devices offered outstanding print capabilities, but were slow, and inconsistent for the first decade of their existence. Again, posing no threat to print, or high-quality colour print reproduction.
Enter now the colour laser pinter. Early colour laser printers were near cousins of the early colour laser copiers, with rips built-in and no scanning assembly. They were expensive, inconsistent, and the consumables were nearly as expensive as ink-jet. They did however have the benefit of being capable of running much higher numbers than an ink-jet device could aspire to. Enter the thought to the service bureau-minded individual, that 'maybe I can just run this to the colour laser instead of taking it to my printery'. Enter the birth of digital short-run printing, and the beginning of the change to that all-important status quo.
It was this point in history that the compelling reasons to go to a real printery for ones print-job were beginning to separate the men from the boys. Now, people were willing to accept a slightly sub-standard image and color quality, as well as a sharpness and longevity of traditional print, in order to get it fast, and cheap, in small quantity. Short-run colour became a fast-food industry. Mainstream colour reproduction still remained firmly the realm of the professional, but not because of much other than the fact that 'digital printing' still lacked the image-quality expectations, and the run length economics of offset.
The end-result of this historical observation is that a trend is emerging where the print consumer is increasingly being bombarded with advertisment and marketing that tells them 'colour is not too expensive to use, and digital color printing costs the same as black and white printing'. They are being told that print in colour has no intrinsic value beyond the message contained. I am constantly being spammed with messages offering "Free 500 four-colour business cards... all you pay is the shipping" and the like. This marketing that colour has no value, and print expertise is a frill that can be overlooked, has served to raise the bar of consumer expectations, and lower their cost tolerance for expertise. The trend can be followed all the way back however to the first computer documents, and the message is almost unfailingly the same: The print industry's status quo is driven by the expectations of the consumer... expectations that will move as technology offers them new capabilities in-house. Even prime-time television advertisements in the US eschew the vows of 'colour document systems' that cost pennies per page of offset-quality color print.
The manufacturers of these document systems see that the business world is willing to use color more colour in their materials, once they are assured that the cost is low enough. In toner-based document systems, these costs are amortised directly against the cost of traditional offset print production costs and put into tables showing that representations in their documentation and marketing materials. The lesson is that all print is competitive now. The advantages that we once enjoyed in professional print are markedly less compelling, and the competition is coming from within departments of our current clients.
The future
That is not to say that all is lost in professional print, but it is a reason to look at making sure your client's needs and expectations are being met for now, and for the future. It is important now more than ever to analyse how you can leverage your existing relationship, established working history, and value-added services to establish that essential 'you are the best at printing my documents' decision. They are not looking to replace us, but they are looking at the advertising that the 'document systems' community is providing them with, and wondering if there is a place for that in their facility. If your business caters to corporate clients, and small to mid-level document production, you owe it to yourself to see what the competition is up to... they are preparing the next round of 'it does not look like it was done on a computer' comparisons with the new status quo... colour business documents. The capabilities and performance of these machines, as well as the cost of their consumables will be the next direct competition to office-produced documents, and pressuring the cost of what constitutes professional color print.
While not a close contender for volume production or industries such as packaging etc, digital document solutions offer us a glimpse into that expectations of consumers who may have available to them 'digital toner presses' that meet a large percentage of their needs. They will drive the price-point of what colour reproduction is worth, at least in some forms.
