Experimental Simulation Research of Digital Printing Cost-Efficiency in Comparison to Traditional Printing

Experimenting on basis of real-life processes in graphic products production with the goal being to determine cost-efficiency has never been allowed even as part of the process for gaining new knowledge or for the needs of verifying production standards. The costs of such experiments would be too high and there have never been evidenced cases where books had been printed only in order to study the production process bottlenecks. Digital production models allow experimenting with the tiniest setting details, with parameters of set thesis in printing borderline areas. Real-life printing systems are poorly known when it is necessary to translate them in the form of a computed model that will allow for that same real-life system to be simulated. This paper shows the results of experimental research in respect to the cost-efficiency of producing a certain graphic product with a digital printing workflow compared to a workflow with traditional offset printing. This has become the biggest dilemma in contemporary printing where digital printing has become an integral part of a printing plant’ s options. Experiments have been carried out with digital workflows within our WebPoskok program simulator.