Get Your Business Cards 2.0

So small runs of business cards are about 500. I usually wind up having to buy 1,000. And forget brochures and marketing material: 1,000 of those suckers is considered a reasonable run. I have had to deal with 5,000 of these things time and again, far more than I or anybody else will ever use. I still have pads of branded paper floating around from my first job 20 years ago. And my mother has stationery from her first job 40 years before that.

But finally, digital technology is changing that.

New digital printing processes, which use technologies similar to how an image is rendered in a laser or ink jet printer, are beginning to approach the quality and batch sizes of traditional offset printers. Major digital print outfits like H-P, Agfa and Kodak are pushing the bounds of what digital printing methods can achieve. And the results can be stunning. Take the recent DRUPA print trade event. This show is the Olympics of the printing business, where every four years print's biggest players meet to get a look at the future of their business. This summer the event was in Dusseldorf, Germany, and there were significant improvements in all aspects of digital printing: from prepress to print to processing.

"Digital technologies have entered the workplace and are changing what is possible," says Richard Moross, founder and CEO of MOO.com. "We built this business to bring those tools down to the smallest possible businesses or even individuals."