Introduction

Color Transactional Printing

Transactional printing refers to the production of bills, statements, invoices, checks, insurance policies, and other informational documents with content unique to each recipient. Although traditionally produced on black and white equipment, recent innovations in high-speed color printing have introduced new approaches for producing transactional content. Currently we find three primary uses of color in transactional applications:

High-speed inkjet is often used to eliminate pre-printed forms by producing logos and other color elements on the fly; in most cases the variable data is printed in black and white in the same pass on the press

Full-color toner-based equipment is often used to produce data-driven charts and graphs to spice up transactional documents for a select subset of customers

Single-pass, full-color variable content may also be used to promote a product or service on the document; this is often called “transpromo,” and ties marketing to transactional content

The transactional printing market in North America has peaked in terms of the annual number of impressions produced on digital equipment. The total number of production printers in the market is also slightly declining as many commercial and in-house operations consolidate and run more impressions on fewer, but faster machines.

Overall, the total number of transactional impressions produced on digital production equipment will decline by about one percent per year over the next three to five years. Even so, this decline is far less than many had feared in the face of competition from electronic media.

In the future, different categories of transactional output will exhibit markedly different rates of growth, reflecting a growing trend toward full-color printing. Monochrome output will decrease by about one percent per year, while highlight color printing increases slightly in volume, and full color grows by 38% per year.