Going to the PMA Show in Las Vegas this week was one of the highlights of the year for me. I first started attending this show and conference in 1993. Although I had been involved with digital imaging for over 10 years, the printing industry and print had been my background. I was working at ScanView, the company that made those cute “Bang & Olufsen” looking drum scanners and we had just entered the U.S. market. Digital oriented Graphic Arts dealers already carried similar products, so we were forced to look elsewhere for distribution.

Fortunately, a number of Photo market dealers, computer dealers and a photo lab products company saw the opportunity to present digital technology to the professional photographers they served. Over the first two years of business, almost half of our scanner sales went to the photographic community.

Counter to this sales phenomenon, that first visit I made to the PMA Show was an eye opener. The ScanView drum scanner was almost the only digital imaging product on the show floor in 1993. Old technology seemed to be everywhere else. Ten years later, digital was everywhere. Almost every camera company had more digital than analog in their booths. Wide format printers abounded. High resolution scanners abounded.

There were even digital picture frames, on-line digital picture albums and every manner of digital workflow. So, other than the fact that digital technology was abundant and clearly important to the photographic community, I was hard pressed to find any specific product or workflow that was more important than others.

However, what did come to mind was probably more important. The attendees on the two floors of the new South Convention Center were plentiful. Attendance seemed high, enthusiastic and optimistic. Vendors were busy and seemingly getting good traffic and good prospects. There was an overall sense of "good" at PMA, similar to that from SGIA (Screen Print market), and in stark contrast to Graph Expo (traditional print for pay market) last October.

Contrary to the traditional printing industry, professionals in these two other markets seemed to be optimistic about the future and buying into the reality of digital opportunity. This is contrary to printers, who seem determined to continue promoting offset print while their business declines. No, we don’t mean that offset printing is dead, but only that there are other opportunities for growth that aren’t being properly embraced. Perhaps it’s a good thing for the photographic and screen print communities that “printers’ see gloom and doom!

At PMA, people were talking excitedly about the products they’d seen. Vendors were talking about successfully using the PMA show to develop new business. Newcomers were entering the market from all around the world. Companies were looking for partners. There was a kind of excitement that I, frankly, hadn’t seen for a number of years. And, I found, for the first time in a long time, I wished I’d planned to spend another day on the show floor instead of the other way around. Anyway, that’s how it appeared to me.