This blog entry on whattheythink.com strikes to very core of what I've been preaching about wide format, color, ink and labels for the past few years. We need to be in this!
Commentary & Analysis
“New Print” Will Prevail
Where will printers make money in the future? Some say it will be from digital printing. But digital printing is usurping analog volumes and analog volumes are not growing. In order to grow, the printing industry must find new products and new services.
By Frank Romano
Published: August 12, 2019
Where will printers make money in the future? Some say it will be from digital printing. But digital printing is usurping analog volumes and analog volumes are not growing. In order to grow, the printing industry must find new products and new services.
The move to offset lithography from letterpress opened new doors to profitability. Offset could handle full color more easily than letterpress. Virtually overnight, it was like that scene in "The Wizard of Oz" when the screen goes from Kansas gray to blazing color.
The best example of “new print” is wide-format inkjet printing. Go back to 1995. The first wide-format inkjets were seen as proofers for color printing. Suddenly, signage became a hot market. Not just signage, but color signage. Signage was done by screen printing, but full-color reproduction was not typical. The wide-format machines got bigger and bigger. Commercial printing companies added them to their fleet of production devices. Today, well over half of all printing firms have wide-format inkjet. They make money with a technology that was never predicted. read the rest here