What are your thoughts on going from a traditional short run offset (Quick Printer) shop to an all digital shop, without any offset capabilities in-house? I often have thoughts of making that transition with my shop. Dollar for dollar our digital sales are larger than offset, but our overall volume is greater on the offsets.

I hesitate since we have been in business for 40 years as an small offset/letterpress shop, and are about 10 years into the digital era, with a large growth spurt in the last 5 years. I am fully aware of the costs deferences in the longer static runs but the lines are getting more blurred especially with monochrome.

Just looking for feedback!

Depending on your product offering, that may limit you. For instance, letterhead, envelopes, preprinted shells (invoice, purchase forms), etc. will require offset printing to allow for these products to be run through toner based devices later.

Additionally, if you ever print fluorescents or metallics that will be difficult to migrate to digital.

Here's my 2 cents...

The offset presses you are running are probably the same as they were 10 years ago? They still do what they did then, and can do the stuff you need now (offset work)?

Can you say the same thing about digital? With service contracts that escalate the "click" costs over time, can you honestly say you will be able to run your monochrome digital for the next ten years and stay competitive or even have the uptime / reliability?

That's the challenge, is the planned obsolecence of digital compared to offset. If you can embrace leasing or 3-5 year depreciation for ROI purposes (even when the IRS requires 7+ years) and turn the equipment on that timeline and remain profitable, then yes you can go all digital. Assuming you can afford to turn away the jobs Rugby148 mentioned, or at least have someone to partner with to do those on a broker / outsource basis.

The other challenge is the cost to maintain the skill set for both offset and digital. Digital is a tough thing, especially color digital, to get a solid operator going, just as it is with offset. Anyone can run a digital press, but to get the most out of it, it takes the right kind of operator, just as with offset.

There are plenty of all digital shops out there. They find their niches and focus on them. The equipment roulette game is a tough one, because everyone is building a better mouse trap so to speak. Embrace the concept, look for those that are going against the grain, like not selling razors and razorblades, but allowing you to buy your razorblades from competitive / alternative suppliers (not that this is occuring yet). You wouldn't like it if your offset press was required to buy their ink, their paper, their parts and wait for their techs to fix it? Hopefully digital will head that path to make the transistion easier, but it will take a lot of voices of printers to make it happen.

These are some of my same concerns as well. Our offsets are small, one is a Multi 1250 that is set up just for envelopes and the other is an AB Dick 9870 with a AE T-head. It's not like we are running 40" 8 color perfecter's. I am at the point where it's time to update our platemaker and am running some numbers to see if it would just be more cost effective to outsource the offset work.

Thanks for the feedback.