B&W Digital Printing: It’s Not Just for Color Anymore

In past blogs we have touted the ability of digital printing as a very cost effective solution for high quality, shorter run printing, from a dozen printed pieces to a few thousand, depending on the type of printed product. And while that’s certainly true, black and white printing remains an important part of many companies’ communication strategies, and an essential part of the printing mix. Simply put, you don’t always need color to get your message across. That’s where high speed, high volume B&W digital printing shines.

At Rhino Digital Printing, our high speed, high quality monochrome digital printers can print 120 pages of duplexed (printed on two sides at once) 8 ½ X 11” paper per minute (PPM). Jobs are collated in line (as they are printed) and we also have saddle-stitched (folded and stapled) in line booklet capabilities – so your booklet or manual comes off the press completed and ready to go.
When you add in that digital printing requires very little setup time that also makes high speed black and white digital printing a very quick turnaround option for large quantity B&W runs. In fact, it’s competitive with offset printing from 5,000 to 100,000 pages.

Manuals, Manual, Manuals – The World in Digital Black and White

Despite the fact that we live in an online and mobile age, printed manuals remain one of the best and most convenient means to distribute information. For one thing, the battery on a printed manual never runs out. Plus you can make notes in the margins, highlight passages, dog ear important pages for quick reference…and a drop of water won’t short it out. There are manuals for everything:

• Employee manuals
• Operations manuals
• Owners manuals (user guides)
• Product manuals (instruction manuals, including trouble shooting manuals)
• Service and repair manuals
• Sales manuals
• Software manuals
• Training manuals
• Any information you need to convey manual (or booklet)

The two things they all have in common is that they all tell someone how to do something, and they don’t need to be flashy and colorful, just easily read. So saving money by printing BW is a good idea. Note that black & white doesn’t mean that your digitally printed blog can’t have illustrations and photographs. Modern BW digital printers produce very high quality line art and halftones photographs. (A halftone is created by representing shades of gray with various sized dots of ink – look at a digitally printed photograph with a magnifying glass and you’ll see the dots that create the illusion of gray shades to your unaided eye.) If you have color photos or clipart in your file, no worries – your digital printer can transform these to shades of gray as well with an automated software program.

Lawyers Aren’t the Only Ones with Binding Options: Popular Binding for Manuals

There are many types of bindings for your manual. Rhino Digital Printing offers all of them; simply call to discuss which would be the best option for your manual or booklet.

• Saddle stitch binding: stapled at the fold, ideal for smaller page counts
• Perfect binding: like a paperback book, the pages are glued together at the spine, better for manuals and booklets
• Wire-O Binding: pages are bound together by a wire coil; good for manuals that need to lie flat
• Coil binding: similar to Wire-O but uses a plastic coil
• Three ring binding:  sheets are three hole drilled and hand placed into three ring binders often with collated tabs

What’s Black and White and Read All Over? A Variable Data B&W Mass Mailing

OK, that’s an antique joke, and the punch line is… a newspaper. (Of course those are now printed in color or else they’re online so the joke is outdated.) But here’s a fresh new answer: a mass mailed black and white letter. (Yes, it’s still an effective way to get a message to the 70% – 80% of people who don’t open your emails.) Combine the speed of digital printing with variable data – the ability of a digital press to print a different image on each sheet of paper – and it’s obvious that black and white digital printing is the way to go for a large, personalized mailing. It just makes offset printing…outdated.

Eco-Friendly B&W Digital Printing Makes it Better

With less paper waste than offset printing, digital printing is more ecological – but at Rhino Digital we don’t stop there. We offer a full line of environmentally friendly papers, many of which are 100% recycled and chlorine-free, as are our shipping boxes. In addition, many of our practices, from using green energy to recycling, reduce our footprint on the earth.

Need Help with Your Digital Printing Projects? Call Us!

We’re the high speed, high volume black & white digital printing experts serving the Portland, Oregon area and the U.S. For more information, check out our website at: https://rhinodigital.com. Or better yet, give us a call at: 503-233-2477. We’ll be happy to answer all your questions and help you with tips and information on getting your manuals and other large quantity B&W printing projects done in the most economical and timely manner possible.