Web Offset--Efficiency Is Inevitable

However, the current reality of the all-digital workflow is not quite the ideal. The technologies are still relatively new and sufficiently varied so as to have made standardization difficult. And industry adoption has been a slow, but steady, process. Any technology upgrade costs significant capital, and the printing industry has seen its margins shrink of late. The interim state—the dual workflow of film and CTP—is a financial drain for printers, but many see it as worth the cost of a complete transition. "Because of our reprint business, we need to have two workflows: a conventional and a digital," Bracken explains.