Test Your Digital Printer Before Going Into Production

This is an incredible idea! You can barely logon to any site that mentions printing and publishing without finding a debate on the best printing methods and companies. Offset, long regarded as superior, is being replaced by digital print, which is far less expensive for short press runs; but is the quality there with digital? If high quality can be achieved on a digital press, which types of presses and which companies are doing the best job?

Fourteen students attending a workshop at Germany's Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences,  joined Professor Frank Philippin and designer James Goggin in testing the limits of the digital offerings from Lulu.com.

They created a book that included every conceivable element of design and sent it off to be printed by Lulu. Colored text, rich black and 100% black text was used; Images in CMYK, RGB, half-tone and grayscale were placed alongside each other for comparison; Line patterns, font weight and even trim accuracy was put to the test. On page 68, you'll find this simple statement: "One word in this sentence is coloured rich black. Can you guess which one?" PURE GENIUS!!! Dear Lulu, Please try and print these line, colour, format, texture, and typography tests for us, does it all.

Consumers can purchase the book (thereby testing Lulu themselves) from Lulu for $19.00. But, there's a free, PDF download that you can send to your own printer (CreateSpace comes to mind) to test their capabilities.

I can't wait to try this out.

Above is one of the several pages that tests RGB, CMYK,

half-tone and grayscale images.

 

 

And for anyone who has ever had the frustration of a poor trim, slanted pages or text running into the binding, you'll appreciate this test from page 92.