While it will certainly be many moons before volumes of digital printing exceed those of offset, if ever, the unremitting shift in the industry from analog to digital was clearly demonstrated at Graph Expo. When considering the floor space contracted by press manufacturers, 55% went to the digital side. Heidelberg still has the largest booth, but only barely -- just 3,000 square feet more than HP. Check out my Shifting Sands article which ran on WhatTheyThink today.

I wondered in the article when the crossover actually occurred, since I hadn't been following it that closely. My colleague and industry veteran George Alexander has been more observant than I have been. He wrote in an email to me, "I too have been interested in the proportion of floor space devoted to digital vs. offset technology, and have been tracking it for several years. In case you are interested, according to my calculations the cross-over point (when digital caught up with offset) actually occurred at Graph Expo ’06, with roughly 65,000 square feet for each. The calculation was harder that year because so many of the vendors (including Kodak, Punch Graphix, Fuji, Screen, Agfa, and Konica) devoted part of their space to offset-related products and part to digital, so I had to estimate percentages for each. There’s a little less of that now."

As it turns out, that was the first year one of the major press manufacturers (manroland) showed up at the show with no press equipment. It will be quite interesting to see what happens at Print ... I plan to save the floorplan so I can make specific comparisons.