Use this article when your shop runs an HP Indigo, Xerox, Konica Minolta, or Canon sheet press and you need to understand how Estimator prices a digital run. After this you will know how click rates and ink-coverage tiers drive the cost, where the controls live, and what makes a digital quote different from offset.
What a sheet-fed digital press is in Estimator
A sheet-fed digital press is a record under Estimate Setup → Print Machines → Sheet-Fed Digital. Estimator prices a digital run using two classes of fields that are particular to digital. The first is the click rate — the contract price you pay your press manufacturer for each side imaged. Digital records carry separate click rates for CMYK colour, mono (black only), and white ink. The second is ink coverage tiers — multipliers on the click rate that vary by how much ink the artwork lays down (Very Light, Standard, Heavy).
The press also shares the general fields with every print machine — sheet-size range, stock caliper limit, labour rate, run speed — but the click-rate and coverage-tier fields are what change when the Machine Type drop-down is set to Sheet-Fed Digital.
A worked example
Northgate Press configures the HP Indigo (digital sheet-fed, labour rate €350/hour, output 5,000 sides per hour) for a 4/4 short-run brochure. The CMY click rate is set to €0.008 per impression, the mono (black) click rate to €0.008, and the white-ink click rate to €0.04. Ink coverage tiers are set to Very Light 0.70, Standard 1.0, Heavy 1.1.
A quote for 200 brochures on Silk 150gsm comes back with:
CMY clicks — 400 sides imaged × €0.008 = €3.20 at the Standard tier, or €2.24 if the artwork classifies as Very Light coverage.
Run time — 400 sides ÷ 5,000 sides/hour ≈ 5 minutes; the labour-rate cost on this short run is roughly €29 at €350/hour, mostly absorbed by make-ready.
No plate line — digital records skip the plate cost because there are no plates.
The price breakdown shows separate lines for clicks (per colour channel), labour, and substrate. Switching the job to mono-only artwork moves the click line to the mono rate and zeroes the CMY contribution.
These values come from the HP Indigo record in the Northgate Press seed (cited in the evidence packet). The same math runs on every digital quote.
What this affects
Click lines — every digital quote shows separate lines for CMY clicks, mono clicks, and white-ink clicks (when used). Clicks are per impression, not per sheet — a 4/4 job registers two clicks per sheet because both sides are imaged.
Ink coverage tier classification — Estimator picks a tier (Very Light / Standard / Heavy) based on the artwork's ink load and multiplies the click rate accordingly. The tier name appears on the quote breakdown.
Labour line — driven by the labour rate per hour times the calculated run minutes. Digital presses typically carry the operator cost in the labour rate rather than the machine rate.
Run-speed override table — when configured on the press, overrides the default output per hour for specific paper weights, coatings, or sheet sizes.
What this does not affect
Plate cost / plate-making labour — those fields belong to offset records; digital records ignore them. Setting plate cost on a digital press has no effect on the quote.
Wash-up time / spot-colour make-ready — both are offset-only mechanisms tied to ink units that digital does not have.
Web width / cutoff length / paper waste — those are web-press fields; sheet-fed digital uses sheet-size range.
Finishing operations — cut, fold, bind, laminate, and other post-press steps are configured under Finishing Machines and Binding Machines, not on the press.