In our 2019 retrospective in the December print issue of WhatTheyThink, we remarked that during the latter portion of the past decade we have been seeing a “print recovery” largely driven by inkjet printing and its proliferation in just about every corner of the industry. Packaging, textiles, and industrial printing are the most recent beneficiaries of advances in inkjet, but wide-format printing was among the first. When I first started covering wide-format printing in the mid-1990s, electrostatic was the dominant imaging technology and the inkjet was just starting to take off. The first wide-format flatbeds appeared in 2001, and the next two decades would see dramatic improvements in the technology. It wasn’t until the late 2000s/early 2010s that wide format became a major force—and business opportunity.

Dr. Joe Webb once wrote that “the wide-format market is like Florida: everyone is from somewhere else.” That was five or six years ago, and while it was true then—the nascent wide-format market comprised photolabs, repro shops, some commercial printers, and others who came from disparate, shrinking markets—that mass migration to wide format is largely over; those who are likely to have added it have added it and it sits comfortably with the other products and services they offer. Those who have never had much interest in it still have no interest in it, and may never. Our Fall 2019 Business Outlook Survey—which is currently being tabulated and analyzed—bears this out. Here is a sneak preview of that data:

Have you added, or do you plan to add, wide-format printing capabilities?