Hi.  This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  The other day I was looking at a copy of one of the magazines for the packaging industry, Packaging Design, one of my favorites.  And they had on the cover two cans…

…with some printing on them, multi-color printing if you will, with some very nice design and imagery.  And I thought back to 1995, and many of you may not remember, but Indigo did a demonstration of printing on cans.  This was 1995.  They called it “The Cannery.”  And the cans were filled with water and they came down, and as they would turn they were printed at the same time by the Indigo—a special version of the Indigo machine called the Omnius Cannery, Drupa 95.  It was printed especially for you because they wanted to demonstrate that they could also personalize the can.  And I got two of them as I recall.  Here’s the other one for Christina—her name is on there.  You can see they’ve been dented and banged up over the years.  I poured the water out because it was not drinkable.

But they are collector’s items because I don’t think too many people have saved these cans.  And if you think about this, this is very interesting.  They’re actually putting pictures of people on there, whereas, most cans would have other kinds of imagery, mostly line art with logo.  It just seems to me that digital printing, it’s going to open up unbelievable avenues of opportunity in the packaging world, not only for cans but for all forms of packaging because of the ability to put images on boxes and plastic materials and pads and labels.  Now the label business has been revolutionized by digital printing.  There are a thousand Indigo machines out there doing labels and they’ve done a phenomenal job.  Most of the new introductions of inkjet printing have involved the label marketplace.  In fact, I expect to see much more of that at the upcoming Drupa show.  

So I have no doubt that over the next few months there will be little leaks of information by the Drupa.  One of the main things we’re going to see is going to be digital printing, especially inkjet, adapted to the packaging side of the industry and the big movement will be toward flexible materials.  And then ultimately someone will figure out other ways to do this … and we will have personalized cans…

… of all kinds.  And that’s my opinion.