Can high-volume ink jets compete with the rotary press for short runs?
The rotary press is one of the familiar icons of newspapering because it is the formative technology upon which the mass market daily has been built. Invented in the mid-19th century, it offered the ability to produce large runs at low cost, enabling newspaper pioneers like Joseph Pulitzer to design more eye-grabbing pages at prices affordable to the working stiff and modern newspaper journalism was reborn. More than a century later the newspaper suffers a terrible cost disadvantage vis a vis the Web as an audience-getting medium, and many wonder whether paper is passe as a presentation vehicle for news. Against this backdrop Poynter Institute editor Amy Gahran writes about the emergence of high-volume, low-cost inkjets. Her blog is based on research done by newspaper consultant Vin Crosbie who talks about Short Run Digital Printing (SRDP) systems from Kodak U.S.A., Océ of Belgium, Fuji Xerox in Japan, and Agfa in Germany. He writes: “For example, Agfa’s Dotrix duplex press can print 3
