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.
Discussion
By Pat Berger on Nov 04, 2008
ROI.
The cost of setting up 1 40 inch press is more than setting up a booth of digitial printers.
Your reallistic potential customers for a 40 inch press sale at a show are probably less than 10.
These shows cost some big press manufacturers $500,000.00 plus.
It is more economical to fly potential customers to a show demo room.
You can do hundreds of demo's for $500,000.00
My take on the Graph Expo digital verses offset is purely showmanship cost effectiveness.
By Don on Nov 04, 2008
Agreed. And a Drupa year as well. I'd rather set up for Drupa than the declining attendance of GE. It will be interesting to see the numbers, but it sure looked like there were more exhibitors at Graph than visitors. Just watching the security folks scanning badges for 5 minutes was enlightening. Wednesday was a joke. Students and competitors all day long.
By Michael Josefowicz on Nov 04, 2008
Does it indicate that the big action is at Drupa where the whole world is watching? That might make sense given differential growth rates in mature economies versus emerging economies.
Is the USA becoming a niche market for print machinery?
By Bill Fleck on Nov 04, 2008
Have you talked to the Kodak's, Xerox's & other digital manufacturers to find out how many digital presses were returned in '08 VS how many were sold?? Saturation is an issue currently. Easy in, easy money.............not necessarily true!