Sooner or later, anyone ordering print gets asked: "litho or digital?" Most people nod politely and hope the printer makes the right call. Fair enough. The difference between the two is one of those bits of trade knowledge nobody outside the print works really needs to know, until they do.
We run both at W. O. Jones, so we're not selling one over the other in this article. The two methods do different jobs, and the printer who tells you "we always use one" is usually telling you they only own one. Here is what each does well, where the line between them sits, and how we actually decide for a job when it lands on our desk in Llangefni.
We've been running W. O. Jones out of Llangefni since 1904, so we've spent rather a long time watching how businesses go about choosing a commercial printer. Some choose well. Some don't. After 120-odd years of helping customers make those decisions, and as the only commercial printer of any real scale left in North Wales, we've developed a view on what makes a print supplier worth using and what makes one worth avoiding.
This is that view, written as if we were buying print rather than selling it. It isn't a list of the best printers in the area. It's a guide to recognising a good one when you see one. The fact that we tick most of these boxes ourselves is, we hope, helpful rather than a coincidence.