Offset Lithography: The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be

I was at a Christmas party last December and was talking with someone who had started a small printing business in his garage using old letterpress equipment (but then is there any other kind?). He and his wife produce short-run, specialty items like wedding invitations. Letterpress, of course, used to be the dominant, mainstream printing technology until, by the end of the 1970s, it was rendered obsolete by offset lithography. And now, 20 years after the advent of digital printing and its explosive growth, could offset be following letterpress out of pressrooms and into garages and museums?

“Offset will become a specialty process for its varieties of substrates, finishes, and sizes for small, high-value jobs—basically what other approaches can’t do well—and for very long runs,” said author and industry analyst Dr. Joseph Webb. “The main volume of print will be digital, toner or inkjet, for the rest of the market. Offset’s share will continue to decline faster than the overall pie shrinks. Right now it seems somewhat stable, but if inkjet lives up to its expectations, [offset] will have a faster decline.” Dr. Webb does see some near-term opportunities for offset. “There are still operations who can benefit from a new offset press that eliminates three or four older press lines, but that window is closing.”

In 2013, Smithers Pira released a study called The Future of Offset vs. Digital Printing to 2018 in which it stated that “The volume of all offset prints will have fallen by 10.2 percent across the world between 2008 and 2018, while digital print volume is forecast to grow by 68.3 percent.” Those data are congruent with what other industry analysts have found. At last September’s Graph Expo, industry expert Frank Romano gave a presentation in which offset was slated to decline from 49 percent of industry volume in 2012 to 37 percent by 2020. Digital inkjet will soar from nine percent to 21 percent over that same time frame.

“Numbers don’t lie,” said Romano. “Offset volume is declining as digital volume is rising. At some point, offset will be between 30 and 40 percent of all print volume. Offset will continue to be a viable process because of long runs, and perhaps because of its ability to handle spot colors. Perhaps because of the ability to handle a wide range of substrates. Offset will still be there; but some of the offset suppliers will not.”

As printing becomes a medium more geared toward specialty products, offset—like virtually every other printing process—will still have a unique niche.

“No printing process truly dies, except maybe collotype,” said Romano. “Letterpress is seeing a renaissance. Flexo is going strong. Gravure volume is declining but still meets certain needs. Analog and digital printing will live in an uneasy harmony far into the future.”

If you look at any sector or end-use market in the printing industry today, you’ll notice that the biggest drivers of the demand for print are short runs (“short” being a relative term) and personalization/customization, as well as “just-in-time” printing. These are things for which offset—or, in fact other analog processes in general—are not well-suited.

“The balance between offset and digital print will be determined by market requirements for customized documents and just-in-time manufacturing,” said Jim Hamilton of InfoTrends. “The balance between offset and digital—and other means of information delivery—will occur on an application-by-application basis where the aspects of cost, productivity, format, and print requirements like Pantone colors and special effects are weighed against the possibilities for workflow automation and process improvement. There is a lot of room in this world for those last two items and digital print is certainly better positioned to drive that type of progress in print.”

Is there anything that could resuscitate offset and restore it to its former glory?

“There are no imminent trends that indicate that offset could make a comeback,” said Hamilton, “though there is plenty of opportunity for hybrid solutions that take advantage of the manufacturing excellence of offset with the personalization possibilities of digital. Much of this is being driven by high-speed inkjet technologies that are fast enough now to operate at the speeds of sheetfed and web offset presses.”

Think of digital inkjet imprinting or true inkjet printing added to an offset line, such we are starting to see in newspaper applications.

There are also some practical and logistical issues that will impact the future of offset.

“From a production perspective, operational simplicity is another factor in favor of digital print,” said Hamilton. “In the future, it will become harder and harder to find offset press operators, and to convince them that they have long-term job security. Some digital print processes also present a more eco-friendly aspect, as long as solvents are not involved.”

Still, Hamilton and InfoTrends also don’t see offset vanishing entirely. “Offset will continue to decline in terms of overall page volume, but it will not go away,” he said. “Offset’s ability to manufacture large quantities of documents very cost effectively will continue to be valuable for many print applications.”

In our recent book, This Point Forward: The New Start the Marketplace Demands, Dr. Webb and I stated, “The offset era is over. The demand for print, when there is demand for print, is for fast-turnaround, highly targeted, personalized, applications.…Offset is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Again, that doesn’t mean no one owns or uses offset presses; it means that offset is not the mainstream printing technology any longer. Think about it this way: offset is no longer the mainstream technology for a medium that is itself no longer a mainstream medium. Offset is becoming the process that is used for things that can’t be done well on digital presses.”

So the larger question is not just what is the future of offset, but what is the future of printing in general. Like offset, print won’t go away, but it will play more of a supporting, rather than leading, role in a larger cross-media universe.

“Print will continue to be an essential component of the communications mix as consumers and knowledge workers establish a new equilibrium based on the inclusion of new media types and channels into our personal and professional life,” said Chris Bondy, director of RIT’s Cross-Media Innovation Center (CMIC). “We rarely discontinue the use of a media; we simply rebalance the usage and incorporate the new and old media in a newly reconciled mix. Print volumes will stabilize for the short-term now that the results of the recession are leveling out and the recent wave of new technologies have been integrated into our culture and professional practice. The once disruptive wave of new intriguing technologies like; tablets, social media, smart phones, etc. are now becoming mainstream as solution and service providers are figuring out more effective ways to use all media types in harmony with well planned and executed deployments.”

Offset presses won’t be consigned to the garage or the museum just yet—in fact, probably not for the foreseeable future. Whether it’s 37 percent or 40-something percent of the market, that’s still a substantial chunk of printing. As we saw with letterpress in the last century, no process stays on top forever. That’s just the way technology evolves. And, who knows, maybe in 30 or 50 years time, we’ll be asking serous questions about the future of digital printing.