Comment by gucci-on-fleek

> I don't believe that even a high end home/office printer can produce better quality prints than the best offset lithography practices.

Sure, but not many products are printed using the best offset lithography practices, most are just using whatever's cheapest.

> One reason that offset lithography has better quality is because of the ink, which can be mixed for a specific print job (called spot colors). Regular CMYK printing cannot achieve the color space that spot colors can.

Yeah, spot colours are pretty cool, but my impression was that they tended to be used in things like packaging or books with hundreds of thousands of copies printed, not things that you could conceivably replace with with POD. Or am I mistaken here and spot colours are more widely used than I thought?

> Another reason is that typical offset lithography processes produce images with 2400 DPI, and it can go even higher than that.

Wouldn't that only be useful for greyscale though? I doubt that you could get good enough registration for 2400 DPI to be useful with multiple plates. Or is registration precise enough these days?

> The highest DPI I've seen on a inkjet printer was 1200.

These printers claim to be able to print at 2400 DPI [0] [1], but I'm pretty skeptical that the quality would actually be that good.

[0]: https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/pixma-ip8720#tech-spec-data

[1]: https://www.brother-usa.com/products/hll9410cdn#Print