On September 21, IDC’s Tim Greene and I presented a webinar that looked at the current state of wide-format printing and offered an outlook for 2023 and beyond. Over the course of the session, we looked at a variety of technological, economic, and demographic trends, and one of the most important technology trends currently impacting wide-format printing is automation.

In many ways, wide format is recapitulating the automation trend that we saw in general commercial printing in the 2000s and 2010s. For ages, it had always been argued that wide format defied any attempt to automate as it was widely believed to be a highly “artisanal” craft printing where every job is unique in some way. Which is interesting, as this was the exact argument that had long been made against automating printing in general.

While the automation train left the station before COVID and before the employee shortage situation became as dire as it has since become, post-pandemic, many wide-format and signage shops have found the production employee shortage to have become critical, and I’ve even heard stories of owners themselves stepping in and handling production. So that situation has hastened a push toward automating wide-format production workflows. In the webinar, Tim shared some IDC data from its Production & Large Format Printer Survey that found that two-thirds of shops surveyed had plans to add automation to its digital printing processes.