In recent weeks there have been a two interesting reports from Gartner and Infotrends on the position of digital printing compared with offset printing. I also received some interesting data calculated by HP Indigo that looked at worldwide sales of both digital and offset presses. These make one reassess the ongoing situation for these two printing technologies particularly when also looking at future digital printing products that should enter the market in the next year.

First let me comment on the figures I obtained from a presentation at the Print2009 event in Stockholm, given by Alon Bar-Shany, VP and General Manager of the HP Indigo Press division. In this presentation he looked at the sales of both offset presses and high-end (1m – 10m duty cycle) digital presses. HP indicate that these numbers are estimates obtained from multiple sources and from discussions with various industry analysts and vendors, and that the give no warranty with respect to the accuracy of the information. The figures shown on the chart show estimated sales in the different parts of the world for B1, B2 and B3 format offset presses and for high-end digital presses. These figures show the major market for offset presses is the rest of the world (ROW) (i.e. not North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa). It also shows that digital press sales were high in both EMEA and North America, but relatively low in ROW. It may be that both North America and Europe have reached a high saturation level of modern offset presses based upon the substantial contraction of the printing industry in those areas, whereas the ROW areas are still expanding their traditional print markets. It is also interesting to look further at the sales of digital presses.

The figures given by HP Indigo only cover the top of the market. If one were to extend these figures to cover the mid-range digital presses with duty cycles between 301, 000 and 1 million (presses that include the Xerox Docucolor 7000 and 8000 and the Canon Imagepress C7000VP) that predominantly sell into the graphic arts markets, then the volume of digital presses increase substantially. These products tend to sell at least double the volume of the high-end presses. I don’t have numbers for 2008 but in 2007 Infotrends show sales of 2,572 such units in US and Europe. On that basis I would estimate that 2008 sales for such products in total would be 3,500 units and this would make the total sales of digital presses predominantly sold to graphic arts markets in 2008 to be in excess of 5,000 units. Extrapolating these figures further one could estimate that the total money spent on digital presses by the graphic arts markets in 2008 exceeded that spent on digital presses. If that is the case then 2008 is a milestone year in the transition to digital printing.