Digital printing is the process of making prints from an electronic file. The artwork is created on a computer and directly printed to a variety of material. It usually refers to professional printing where small-run jobs from desktop publishing and other digital sources are printed using large-format and/or high-volume laser or inkjet printers. Digital printing doesn't use plates the way offset does, but instead uses options such as toner (like in laser printers) or larger printers that do use liquid ink.

Digital print is suitable for low volume print jobs. While it usually costs more than traditional offset print method, digital print provides flexibilities on the printing process and printing duration. Most of the source file formats (e.g. Adobe Illustrator, PDF, JPEG, PNG, etc) are acceptable for digital printing. Modification is easier to be done via digital print method since you can print a single test copy to check whether the design or quality of printout is satisfying. And because offset requires plates for each non-repeating content, digital print method will be more economical and time-efficient as there is no need to prepare plates for each page of non-repeating content.

There are limitations for certain digital printers. The common limitation is that the digital printout couldn’t fulfil borderless printing for most of the digital printers (hence the printable area must fit within bleeding lines and borders). This problem can be solved using electronic cutter to trim all unwanted white borders from the printout and leave no flaw. The second limitation of the digital printers is that the colour ink is not transferred to the paper in the same way as offset printing. In other words, the colour produced by digital print is slightly less accurate than offset printing. In year 2020, there is a wide range of printing materials available and some of these materials are able to compensate the weakness of digital printer in terms of colour accuracy and deliver printout result similar to those of offset printing.

In year 2020, most of the digital printers are using CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) colour format to ensure different ranges of colors are able to be accurately produced during the printing process. However, there are still many RGB (Red, Green Blue) colour format source files since it is the main display colors for computers and scanners. Conversion from RGB to CMYK has to be done before the printing process. The outcome doesn’t suffer much from the conversion from RGB to CMYK.