SGIA ’06 came back to Las Vegas with a roar. Given the fact that last year’s SGIA was severely limited due to its original location, New Orleans, being unavailable, and that the prior year’s SGIA being in “remote” Minneapolis kept many away, this year’s event (September 26-29) was expected to be a big one for many companies. The final statistics from SGIA indicated that attendance approached almost 21,000, a record, 50% larger than the previous record, and with decent breadth:

• total number of exhibitors: 598
• U.S. attendance was from every state and the District of Columbia
• 82.5 percent of attendance was from the U.S.; the remainder from 105 countries, mostly Canada and Mexico.

Basically, SGIA has become the major worldwide venue for the specialty graphics market. And in its aisles, one could see plainly that the digital specialty graphics market is following precisely the path of other digital printing technologies.