In case you have been trapped in an underwater pyramid for the past few years, here’s the story so far:

There’s no denying that wide format is a mature sector of the printing industry, and perhaps most symbolic of where things stand today is the news last spring that Agfa had acquired Inca Digital. Back in 2001, Inca’s Eagle was one of the first commercially successful UV flatbeds and really helped kick off that product category. Agfa is no slouch itself when it comes to flatbeds, but one of the things that appealed to Agfa was Inca’s developments in single-pass printing for packaging, which is now the high-potential-growth sector of the industry—kind of where wide format was a decade ago. In response, Fujifilm, a partner of Inca that had distributed its high-end Onset presses, announced a partnership with Spanish industrial print manufacturer Barberán to develop a single-pass wide-format printer capable of printing at speeds up to 6,000 square meters per hour. We’ve mostly heard of single-pass inkjet in the context of corrugated printing, but the Fujifilm announcement specifically addressed single-pass inkjet for sign and display graphics producers. If single-pass inkjet could reach the quality level demanded by display graphics customers, the gain in speed could be quite the productivity boon. Sure, wide-format productivity isn’t always about speed, but it helps, and we’ll be interested to see what Fujifilm/Barberán comes out with.

So, indeed, packaging is the next great adventure for the industry; if you look at the pace of technology advancements, the number of packaging-centric shows, and the sheer number of packaging-related press releases, that is certainly the sector of the industry gaining the most attention—again, kind of where wide format had been 10 or 15 years ago.