For those “older” baseball fans, you may remember “déjà vu all over again” as one of the more the famous quotes of Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, dating from 1953. He was referring to the back-to-back home runs of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, but essentially in his own inimitable way, he was just ruminating on how history can repeat itself. As I look at the transition/transformation of packaging from analog to digital print production, I am having those same feelings.

In the 1990s, digital print was introduced, initially with the Xerox DocuTech 135 and then with the introductions of the Indigo Eprint and Xeikon DCP-1 at the IPEX print event in Birmingham, UK. At that point there was a flurry of excitement and lots of projections about how this would lead to the explosion of variable data printing, one to one marketing and the ultimate demise of offset printing. The reality is that it took digital print, primarily in the form of EP (toner) technologies, almost 15 years to reach the level of offset print volume. One-to-one marketing is really just starting to find its way to a reasonable level of adoption, although the “on-demand” benefits of digital print have brought the concept of mass customization to the forefront. So, if digital print was introduced in the early 1990s, why is it taking so long for it to reach its predetermined goals, and in the case of digital packaging production, are we in for the same long ride or can we learn from history?

As an analyst, technologist, and even as a former prepress and printing company owner, I am always looking to apply the benefits of technology in my daily work. Although, over time I have learned that unless I am operating in a process that is exempt from the interaction of other people, this can bring challenges to any implementation. In thinking about the first digital print transition and now the digital packaging transition, it is even more evident.