“Most of you will make most of your profits in analog printing,” said Brent Montcrief, Fujifilm’s VP of Marketing, addressing a roomful of offset and digital printers at a user event last week at the Fujifilm customer experience center in Hanover Park, Ill., to launch the next-generation J Press 750S, Fujifilm’s cut-sheet production inkjet press. Indeed, as Marco Boer pointed out in a keynote presentation at the event, “offset still accounts for 95% of all pages.” That all said, digital pages continue to rise and offset pages continue to fall—is there a tipping point on the horizon?

As the push for automation in all facets of print production becomes stronger, and qualified press operators become scarcer, digital workflows are likely to proliferate even further than they have. Old analog equipment will linger, but the challenge will be to find people to run it. By Boer’s estimates, 2026 is when we will start to see this tipping point. By then, adopting production inkjet—or some manner of digital printing—may not even be a choice.

The automation advantage of a digital workflow isn’t the only driver of production inkjet, of course; there is the usual trinity of trends: declining run lengths, greater use of customization and personalization, and faster turnaround times.