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Cary Sherburne:  Hi, I'm Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Bill Lamparter, who is president of Print Comm and a well known printing industry analyst.  Glad to have you here with us.

Bill Lamparter:  It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Cary Sherburne:  So we’re fast approaching Drupa 2012.  It seems like we just finished 2008 and I wondered if you could kind of give us your perspective on why you think it’s an important show or if you think it’s an important show and why both visitors and exhibitors should take the time to go there.

Bill Lamparter:  Well let’s go back to 2008 for openers.  A lot of analysts characterize 2008 as either a digital show or an ink jet show and yes, those products were there and they were important, but in reality what 2008 was, was really an offset show because there was a huge number of developments in the offset printing area.  2012, yes, ’12 is going to be somewhat similar.  There will be a great deal of offset equipment on the floor of that show and there are people from all over the world come and look at that equipment.  There are a lot of plants today that have both offset equipment and digital equipment and Drupa is a place where you can see both of those technologies and you can see how they interrelate to each other.  The thing that’s been happening since Drupa 2008 is software has been growing in importance to the printing industry where today we are really a computer centric, a computer information technology management information systems sensitive kind of industry and they’ll be a lot of those products on the floor, but all of that being said ink jet is still going to be probably the crown prince of the upcoming Drupa.  There will be ink jet systems there that are wider, faster and from companies you never heard of and so it’s going to be something of a watershed for that type of equipment and really if you look at the Drupas of the past and see the planning that is starting for the upcoming Drupa it’s really kind of a smorgasbord of printing industry and things that are now closely allied to print as we expand out into multiple media technologies.  All of that is in all likelihood going to be on the floor of the show.

Now there are a lot of things at Drupa that are introduced for the first time.  Some of them are real products.  Some of them are tests and some of them are really in the dreamboat stage if you will, but if you want to stay abreast of technology there is really no place to go like Drupa in Dusseldorf.

Cary Sherburne:  That’s great.  Thank you.  We’ll look forward to seeing you there.  

Bill Lamparter:  I’ll be there with bells on.

 

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