For many people we think of digital printing as a "Western" printing technology. This however is far from the truth, digital color printing is a major international operation. This was shown last night at an event I was privileged to attend. HP Indigo hosted a major dinner for its customers and for this they ran an awards competition to assess the best of HP Indigo digital printing. Nearly 700 people were at this event. Entries were submitted long before drupa and a panel of independent judges headed by by a senior professor from RIT judged these entries under five classifications in an intensive two-day session. In all 482 entries were submitted by HP Indigo's customers from 31 countries. The results were very interesting as they showed that print quality is international and not restricted to countries such as USA and Germany. In fact none of the winners of each of the classifications came from these two countries.

In the Publishing category the winner was Vouremja from Russia. In General Print the winner was QLArt from Beijing, China. In the Photo classification again the winner came from China this time it was Guangdong Guanazhou Bix. It was only in the more business driven classifications that western companies were the winners. In the Marketing Collateral classification the winner was Cambrian Printing Services from Wales, UK. The company coming second in this class also came from the UK and was C and R Printing. In the Direct Marketing class the winner was FSA Group from Canada with second place going to Cenveo from the USA. All in all taking first second and third placements into account there were five winners from N. America, four from Europe, three from Asia Pacific and two from Latin America, a good worldwide spread.

This situation is both interesting and worrying for western printers. The developments of major print exports from counties like China is significant and if these countries are now excelling in quality as well as lower costs, western printers have to look at other key attributes they have to offer in order to succeed.