Almost 700 exhibitors and an estimated ~30,000 attendees crowded into 724,000 square feet in Dallas’s Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center as the inaugural PRINTING United kicked off yesterday. The much-anticipated show—heir to the erstwhile SGIA Expo—was designed to be an “under one roof concept,” said Ford Bowers, President and CEO of SGIA, in a PRINTNG United press conference Wednesday morning. “We have as many [exihibitors] as we can fit in one room.” Virtually every aspect of printing today was amply represented, affording exhibiting companies the opportunity to “bring the full range of their equipment,” said Bowers, “more for the commercial, packaging, and inplant markets and not just wide-format and textiles,” which tended to be the case with the SGIA Expo. Indeed, anyone who puts ink on anything is likely to find something of interest; production inkjet presses for small-format printing sat side-by-side with wide-format printers; digital textile printers sat next to screen presses. Vehicles sat ready to be wrapped, and in one part of the show floor, there were flocks of feather flags. There were inkjet corrugated packaging presses. Heck, there was even an offset press.

There was no avoiding the dreaded word “convergence,” which, as much as some of us may dislike it, was the theme of the show, as all the different varieties of print—commercial, sign and display, industrial, textile, etc.—are all mutually enabled by the same basic technologies, opening up new opportunities for print businesses.

The entire WhatTheyThink team is here at the show, and over the next several days we will have a lot more to report, but after Day One, we had some initial first impressions.