Our own Dr. Joe Webb has just published the results of his latest survey of commercial printers and their planned investments for 2014—Strategies for Management’s 2014 U.S. Commercial Printers Capital Investment Survey and Forecast. In this extensive report, he looks at investment plans for a wide variety of printing equipment, hardware, and software, but for our purposes here, we’ll focus on the data pertaining specifically to wide-format capabilities. At other times in this space, our contributors have provided equipment investment or installed base data for companies in specific wide-format markets—sign shops, textile producers, and others for whom wide-format output is their bread and butter. What is unique about Dr. Joe’s report is that for the first time we can see what general commercial printers’ intentions are vis-à-vis this equipment and, by extension, the serious of their intentions to get into these new dynamic product categories.

Survey Background and Caveats

The survey was conducted late last fall, and the data compiled was tabulated from a net of 248 usable surveys. The data were analyzed, stratified, and  projected to industry demographics: