The Roland 900 Evolution from manroland Sheetfed

It isn’t done anymore, but a time-honored trade show ritual for the offset press manufacturers used to be closing out their exhibits with a public announcement of the deals they’d signed and the equipment they looked forward to installing. These well-earned bragging rights gave interesting clues to what the industry would look like in terms of capability and capacity after the show was over and the new iron was up and running. 

The offset vendors still publicize sales and installations to the trade media, and the information contained in their press releases is still a good source of intelligence about trends in the adoption of production equipment. For this report, we gathered as many media releases as we could find about installations of sheetfed offset presses in North America in 2023, up to the opening of the PRINTING United Expo in October. We then looked for patterns in the purchases that might shed light on what offset printers think is worth investing in, and why.