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At drupa 2016 260,000 exhibitors and 1,837 visitors touched the future whilst Vladimir Alexandrovitch Tiefenbach made history! On 6th June

Social messages are incredibly volatile and get discarded almost immediately. Anything online can be edited or deleted at the click of a button. But printed content gets written, proofread, edited, put in a graphics design, preflighted and eventually actually printed. Whether offset or digital print, the sheer technology adds extra value to the content a publisher wants to disseminate, says Rainer Kirschke, Business Manager Mobile Publishing at Agfa.

With its theme of Touch the Future, drupa 2016 is shaping up to be one of the best ever. There will be significant focus on technologies such as production inkjet and 3D printing at the show, and those are important topics for the industry. But we shouldn’t lose sight of what’s happening in the world of electrophotography, says Danny Mertens from Xeikon.

Since ancient times, people around the world have been looking to beautify their environment and enrich their lives using decorations. They have used decorative glyphs, paintings, and written words in monochrome and color to reflect their lifestyles and to communicate functional messages. Still today, innovators on worldwide basis always seek solutions for the deposition of decorative and functional materials on everyday objects and surfaces. The driving force behind these developments is the need to mass-produce printed items like books or packaged consumer goods from leading industry brands.

The world of cosmetics is the place to show off, often with fancy printed bottles and glass containers whose value is higher than the contents inside. Yes, the container has been more important to this industry than any other. With a good-looking bottle, you can sell more; with a good fragrance in an ugly bottle, the sales are likely to be low and unprofitable. This presents a great opportunity for digital print. A guest article by Mimaki.

Flexography has made huge strides in recent years, achieving quality that rivals offset and gravure. And now the technology is poised to move to the next level, making it even more competitive with alternative printing technologies, including digital.

Economic concerns, technological threat and uncertain futures have contributed to a crisis of confidence in print. Throw in rapidly changing market expectations and media choices, and you have an industry that’s been on the back foot for several years. But a reversal is underway. Print is reinventing itself to be more vibrant than ever, an energetic force in a multichannel communications world.

Post-press binding and finishing in commercial print, packaging, sign & display graphics and other sectors will be a key attraction at drupa 2016. As they say, it isn’t finished until it is finished … and for many companies, there are still significant opportunities for improving throughput and productivity as well as reducing costs in their post-press departments.