Most industry professionals are aware of the benefits of digital vs.offset printing. The flexibility and quick turn around times that the digital format provides are well- known throughout the print and document services industry. The new challenge in today's demanding fast paced document services climate resides in discovering ever more efficient and cost effective ways to produce digital material.

Digital printing platforms fall into two basic categories; office copiers and production level printing devices. Let's examine a few money saving idea's that can easily be applied to any production level digital printing fleet. The controllable variables associated with digital devices are paper, toner, and file format. Each of these variables offers an opportunity to extract savings, and ultimately add to your bottom line.

The single most effective method for increasing efficiency and saving on digital consumables is performing simple preventative maintenance on your digital printing devices. Digital printing operators should regularly inspect the paper path, feed mechanisms, sensors, and imaging area for paper dust, worn belts or wheels and excess toner build-up. A clean, well maintained machine will save the user from repeatedly clearing paper jams that could have easily been avoided with proper preventative maintenance.

Another tip for digital printing operators is to house all paper stock in a controlled climate. This is a common practice in the offset world, but often neglected by digital print users. The controlled climate will protect your stock from drastic humidity changes which usually result in curled and warped paper. Most digital printing devices have belt and air feed systems. These feed systems are very sensitive to paper curl. A single sheet of curled paper can cause a jam, resulting in the unnecessary waste of losing most of the sheets that are traveling behind the curled sheet. Damaged or curled stock should never be loaded into a digital printing device. Curled stock can be salvaged for note pads, used for mock-ups, recycled, or even donated to your local school system.

Saving toner can be a challenge. At first glance it can appear to be a fruitless effort. But experienced digital print users save on toner usage with two simple, but effective techniques. One way to reduce toner usage is to be sure to print documents that are "black and white" with a black only device. This may sound obvious to most, but it becomes very easy for an operator to produce a black only document on a color device because of convenience (for the operator).

A second way to reduce toner costs is to ensure that a multiple paged document that contains both color and all black pages (a common example is a manual or training material) has a correctly assembled file. A digital file will automatically be produced using all four colors unless the file is composed without a process build or unless the operator sets the machine to produce the file in "black only" mode. Correctly assembling a mixed document containing full color and black only pages by tagging the text portion as "black only" will save the digital print user a substantial amount of toner. Given the cost of a color impression measured against the cost of a black impression, it is imperative that a digital print manager remain diligent in monitoring the output from digital machines.

Digital printing offers many advantages to the document services industry. Efficiencies, speed, and flexibility are attractive attributes of any production level digital printing machine. Storing paper stock in a controlled environment, performing regular preventative maintenance on your devices, using the correct machine, and building your digital printing file with toner savings in mind are all useful techniques that add value to your digital printing workflow, and to your bottom line.