To begin to answer those questions, forget presses for a moment and consider the Porsche 911. It’s now 42 years old, yet most people agree that it’s the best sports car in the world. Those who disagree probably own a Ferrari. Although today’s Porsche is a direct evolution, it supposedly now has only one part in common with the 1963 original. But if you sat down with a clean sheet of paper today, you wouldn’t dream of using a 1963 911 as the basis of a supercar - the engine is at the back, behind the rear wheels, yet for proper roadholding, the engine should be at the front or in the middle. But even in 1963 Porsche had historical constraints - the 911 was developed out of 1950s model Porsches, which were ultimately derived from the dear old pre-war Volkswagen Beetle, which had its engine at the back.

Does this remind you of a printing process? Think of lithography, which also began its rise to its current dominance around four decades ago. Like the Porsche, the 1960s litho press had a lot of background history, stretching back all the way to Alois Senefelder’s invention of the planographic grease-on-stone process in 1798.

Offset lithographic presses are subject to delicate relation­ ships between very thin films of liquids, to the resistance of resilient blankets to organic solvents and abrasive papers, and to the stability of water-loving cellulose fibres in an environment of variable atmosphere and damper fluids. Crazy, except that it works: over the years almost all of the variables have been identified and either eliminated or compensated for.

So today’s offset litho presses are miracles of engineering and chemistry, but as with the Porsche, if you had to invent an entirely new printing machine today, you wouldn’t start from there again. My guess is that you’d start with an ink-jet. Forget about today’s niche applications for short-run and variable print, if ink-jet technology progresses at the rate it’s gone over the past 15 years, then by 2020 it’s going to start knocking “conventional” long-run presses out of the market.

Ink-jet accuracy

Here’s the logic. The ink-jet isn’t just a gadget that’s given away with a new PC. It’s not just a wide-format proofing or poster printer. It’s the most technically elegant printing technology on the planet. Why? Because of its non-impact process with solid-state print heads that operate by piezo electrics, heat or other non-moving technologies. The familiar wide-format or desktop models have travelling heads, but the fastest models available today (such as the Agfa Dotrix and Kodak Versamark printers), have fixed head arrays that extend across the full printing width, so nothing moves except the paper.

All you need is a transport mechanism to move the paper (or any other substrate) under the heads at constant speed. Ink-jet arrays are self-registering and the lack of water or heat means that there’s less of a problem with dimensional stability of your substrate. So the paper feed needs reasonable precision, but nothing on the scale of a web offset or sheetfed press, so it can be cheaper and faster.

Will other digital processes survive in 2020? Dry toner will probably still be around, but like today’s desktop laser printers, the process will have retreated in the face of improved ink-jets, which are intrinsically cheaper to build. Whether they will be cheaper to operate is largely a question of the relative prices of ink-jet fluids versus toner powders.

Matching colour

It’s hard to predict whether HP Indigo’s Electroink and digital offset colour process can remain viable in the face of better ink-jets. The main advantage of the Indigo digital print process is that it lays down an ultra-thin plastic ink layer that, like offset litho ink, matches the texture and gloss of the underlying substrate. The larger particles of dry toner processes sit on top of the undulations over the substrate so they scatter light differently.

But again, ink-jets can match this: their liquid inks match the gloss level of the substrate and UV inks are available that dry instantly. At last year’s Drupa show HP Indigo put on a stunning display of applications, cove ring on-demand photo­ graphs and newsletters, labels, plastic packaging and so on, though an unintended side effect was to make people think “great process, pity those presses are all two-page formats.”

The long-term future of the Indigo technology depends on whether HP decides that it’s worth pouring development money into developing models that are significantly faster and significantly wider than today’s A3+ models.

Yet Indigo faces internal competition for development resources. HP is a world leader in ink-jet technology in its own right and it has just bought the expertise of Scitex Vision, which not only has super-wide grand format printers, but also owns the Aprion MAGIC high-speed ink-jet technology that made such a big splash at Drupa 2000. Aprion didn’t fulfil its early promise, so after Scitex Vision took it over it concentrated on its main strengths in developing it as the Cor]et corrugated printer.

DI (direct imaging) litho presses aren’t really digital because they can’t change their images on the fly. They are really platesetters built into conventional litho presses.

Originally developed by Presstek and Heidelberg as long ago as 1991, they looked like the future of offset printing for a few years. However, by 2000 the advent of faster, more flexible standalone platesetters removed their competitive advantage.

In the long term, DI litho presses will only make sense if a plate imaging technology appears at such a low price that it doesn’t add significantly to the overall price of the press. but this seems unlikely. With a DI press you have to stop printing while new plates are imaged, but with a standalone platesetter you can prepare the next set of plates while the press is still printing. Modern automatic plate changers work quickly and accurately, so plates are in register practically from the first copy. It’s a safe bet that offset litho presses will still be in full production in 2020, but there’s a good chance that none of them will be DI.

2020 Blue sky stuff

We’ve looked at the likely evolutions of current digital and conventional technology by 2020. Now let’s consider some really wacky technologies that are just peeking over the horizon. Some will fail the commercial test, but others may do for print what DTP, CTP, dry toner and ink-jets did in the ’80s and ’90s.

By 2020, today’s thin-film digital displays will probably be widespread - already these can be seen in basic applications such as luminescent graphics displays built into car stereos. Other technologies include “paper - like displays” on very thin flexible plastic, with a high enough contrast resolution to be used for text reading, holding out the potential for electronic books and newspapers.

Even today, technologies like Gyricon and E Ink exist that produce stable images that are preserved when you switch the power off, but can be switched in an instant from digital data. OLEOs (organic light-emitting diodes) are thin plastic sheets with pixels that glow in a full range of colours so they can be used for static or animated illuminated displays, but only when the power is on. Complementing these are development efforts on ultra-thin, printable batteries and circuitry that would, for example, allow wireless updating of a newspaper as you read it on a train.

Life in the old dog yet

However, don’t worry too much about the death of print in the face of these new displays. Since the late ‘70s the death of print has been predicted roughly every 10 years as some new technology appears (remember Teletext?). But don’t write off paper-like displays, as they may be big.

They could take a hold of point of sale and billboard communications, supplanting today’s conventional print production methods such as screen or indeed ink-jet.

If the new display materials become cheap enough, they may start to supplement or even replace “throwaway” print in packaging and label applications - imagine a Playstation game or DVD movie box with an animated preview of the content, or food packaging that can display a different price at different times (with special offers close to the sell - by date).

Another potential application might be hybrid books. These will be normal print books with conventional print areas for fixed content and digital paper or OLEO patches for animated or interactive content. Thinking of the eye­ catching foil blocking on best-sellers, it would be a logical progression to have an animated cover.

And getting back to where we came in, those fabulously versatile ink-jets aren’t just confined to printing. Already there are ink-jets that can build up 30 objects by “printing” layers of plastic that’s then hardened by UV light. The medical world is excited by prototypes that can build up frameworks on which to grow human tissues for skin grafts. And in the catering world there are already edible inks for cake decoration. So the old joke “email me a pizza,” may just come true.