Digital Printing Choices Surge: How Carton Color Printers Can Choose the Right Fit—Not a Pitfall

Digital printing options continue to expand, giving carton color printing businesses more paths to choose from—and more risk of picking the wrong one. Finding a solution that fits the operation is essential. When evaluating a digital printing technology, converters must weigh several variables; in packaging printing and converting, however, the decisive factor is often what a company already does best in the carton color printing market.

Traditional printing remains a powerful force in packaging, yet digital adoption keeps rising as more choices reach the market. To help carton color printing companies assess digital printing options, Packaging Impressions interviewed several industry consultants. They discussed current adoption rates and the issues that should be considered and debated before any purchase.

Pathways into digital printing

A Printing United Alliance/NAPCO Research report, 'The Time for Digital Package Printing Is Now,' found that many carton color printing respondents run both digital and conventional technologies, showing that each plays a key role in serving customer needs. Asked what equipment they use to print carton color boxes, 51% cited digital toner/electrophotographic (EP) systems, 48% cited digital inkjet, 11% bought new machines for hybrid printing, and 4% retrofitted existing equipment for hybrid production. On the traditional side, 49% use narrow- or mid-web flexo and 42% use sheetfed offset.

Lisa Cross, principal analyst at NAPCO Research, noted that carton color printers turn to digital for reasons such as shorter run lengths, faster turnaround, a need for more versions or SKUs, and personalization through serialization and numbering. Other cited benefits include quality and demand for marking and samples.

Those reasons, however, should not be the only trigger for buying a specific digital technology. With so many digital technology suppliers to choose from, Kevin Karstedt, founder and CEO of Karstedt Partners and co-chair of the Digital Packaging Summit (DPS), says companies should first ask: What do I want digital technology to do? What problem will it solve? Are customers asking me to do it, or telling me to do it?

Another question is whether a company truly has a growing volume of short-run work. 'Not every business can thrive on short runs,' he says. 'Some do very well with low-cost, high-volume jobs, and that is exactly what their customers need.'

Personalization, he adds, is not the only reason to print digitally. 'It is a factor, but almost no one does complete one-to-one customization—making a box and sending it to you with your name and custom contents. A few may do it, but the vast majority of carton color printing companies are not.'

That is why OEMs and suppliers should stress practical, important digital benefits such as flexibility instead of 'bells and whistles,' he says. 'Carton color printing companies may not think that way, but brand owners do. OEMs and suppliers must communicate the right message to resonate with buyers.'

Cross explains that in some cases, a carton color printer may invest in a digital press with exciting capabilities that are not the best fit for its business. With so many digital press suppliers available, it is important to consider each company's strengths before investing.

'What we often see in research is that when investing in a press, companies need a pickup truck but end up buying a Ferrari,' she says. 'They did not invest in the right equipment. They may not need that much capacity, speed or long runtime, but they failed to consider or assess their goals, challenges, opportunities and target customers.'

Karstedt says carton color printing companies are usually looking to relieve pressure in manufacturing. In other words, a plant can respond faster and more flexibly to short-run demand—the highlight of digitalization, especially single-pass technology.

He also cautions against getting stuck on the 'crossover point'—comparing conventional printing's order cost and volume with digital printing on equal terms. 'Look at the overall advantages of digital printing, not just digital print capability. We are seeing this in corrugated packaging now; the label market has already done it. We are trying to guide folding carton and flexible packaging companies away from overemphasizing the cost crossover point and toward understanding what customers need and what they are doing.'

Digital printing for carton color boxes

Karstedt says digital adoption in packaging segments can be scaled in two ways: developed markets on one side and developing markets on the other. Labels are the more developed market, where more than half of printers use digital presses, many of them second-, third- or even fourth-generation machines.

In this mature market, Marco Boer, vice president at business consulting and research firm I.T. Strategies and DPS co-chair, says hybrid inkjet plays a significant role because of 'faster, more efficient technology.' 'Remember, when you enter packaging, it really is not about printing—it is about converting,' he adds. 'Printing typically accounts for only 20% of the end user's price, so the real value is in converting. But unless you have digital printing for small-batch production, you cannot achieve that.'

Boer says single-pass printing is also becoming more common in corrugated printing, the second-fastest-growing market for digital printing technology. 'Continuous inkjet uses fewer printheads and moves continuously over the substrate. Unlike single-pass printheads already used in flatbed presses in UV-curable form for more than a decade, which are fixed across the substrate web width, these can print many things, including corrugated displays and corrugated boxes. As a technology, it runs well, but it is too slow to solve the economics of high-volume carton packaging printing.'

With inkjet, the choice between UV and water-based inks also matters. Karstedt says water-based inks are not necessarily suitable for porous board or paper products, comparing it to dropping water on a tissue, where it spreads. 'That harms image resolution, meaning you must pre-coat for water-based ink to work; pre-coating adds cost and makes the manufacturing process more difficult.'

Post-printing, which ensures packaging is protected during transport, is another factor he says should be considered when evaluating technology. Boer attributes strong interest and growth in single-pass inkjet presses—capable of producing tens of thousands of sheets per hour—in the corrugated packaging market to new packaging models such as subscription services. 'There is a lot of interest, especially in what we call the unboxing experience. That means customization or versioning makes customers feel good about the product, rather than having a salesperson/retail experience.'

Meanwhile, Boer says corrugated preprint is a completely different equipment category. It works much like web offset, except that it uses ultra-high-speed web inkjet printing. The process digitally preprints corrugated paper rolls, not corrugated board, then laminates the printed roll to corrugated board before die-cutting and folder-gluing. HP is currently the only company commercially selling a digital preprint system for corrugated. BHS has announced it is building such a system, but commercialization is still a few years away.

Karstedt says direct digital printing on corrugated board is also increasing, and the industry can expect the trend to continue. 'In corrugated board, over the next two to three years, there may be two to three new OEM suppliers per year trying to enter the market, coming from China and Europe. A lot of equipment is already on sale, such as Barberán, HP and EFI. Domino and Xeikon have also entered, so there may be eight now. In two years, maybe 12, and then I guess the industry will begin to consolidate.'

At the same time, Karstedt says the folding carton market has not really embraced digital, 'mainly because there is no truly good solution yet. There are some real early adopters doing it, but for the most part, it is not a problem.'

Folding carton is a more challenging digital market because offset capacity is oversupplied. 'And because packaging overall has much higher margins than general commercial/document printing, it lets you essentially run less efficiently for longer without having to make those larger investment decisions to move to digital for short runs, versioning or even one-to-one,' Karstedt notes. HP Indigo and its liquid electrophotography system, along with toner systems from Xerox and Xeikon, are among the manufacturers available in this space.

In most packaging printing scenarios, the new technology will be inkjet; where possible, it will be water-based, and on certain substrates it may also be UV inkjet. 'And new technologies are emerging that may use water-based... (The original article is longer; this is an excerpt.)'