Ten years ago, the term production inkjet was intended to distinguish high-speed, single-pass inkjet presses from desktop, departmental, and wide-format inkjet devices. Not stated was that production inkjet was primarily used to produce documents like customer communications, books, and direct mail with a bit of signage if you had a B2 sheetfed press. 

Flash forward and high-speed, single-pass inkjet is producing packaging, textiles, and other industrial applications typically assigned their own inkjet categories. The production inkjet category continues, accurately or not, to refer to document-related applications.

Marco Boer of I.T. Strategies notes “We define [production inkjet] strictly as document printing. We keep all the other market separate.” He cited 13 subcategories of inkjet printing with total OEM revenues for hardware ink and service estimated at US$16.3 billion in 2022 and growing to US$24.5 billion by 2028. Of that total revenue, about 14% (2.3B) relates to production inkjet with a projected 13% compound annual growth rate bringing revenues to 4.7 billion and 19% of the total inkjet OEM revenues.