Although offset lithography continues to deliver the largest single share of the world’s printed pages, it has been a long time since the process was the predominant production technology at drupa. Nevertheless, it still has a significant profile at the show: a search of exhibitors at the drupa 2024 website turns up 123 product and vendor listings within the category.

To earn the recognition it deserves at this year’s event, offset will have to impress showgoers with the strides it has made in mechanical efficiency, operating economy, sustainable production, and automation for reduced reliance on human labor. A review of exhibit plans by the four leading providers of sheetfed offset equipment to the North American market indicates that offset will shine under all of these headings.

In particular, visitors should expect to hear much more about autonomous printing than it was possible for the vendors to say at the last drupa in 2016. Since then, thanks to digitization and workflow integration, sheetfed presses have gained the ability to make and carry out many of their own decisions about getting jobs into the print queue and monitoring them for quality while they run. Operator input remains essential, but not to the 100% hands-on extent it used to be – a potential blessing for shops in search of ways to substitute automation for increasingly hard-to-find human skills.