Special Drupa Coverage — Drupa Foretells Digital Future

Many of the product introductions were already covered in one of the Drupa Countdown stories published in editions of Printing Impressions leading up to the show. Therefore, this wrap-up will primarily focus on what was new in Düsseldorf.

The event lived up to its billing as The Ink-Jet Drupa, with “green printing” being the only challenger as a show theme since virtually every exhibitor touched on it. As the market expands, “ink-jet” increasingly is losing its usefulness as a label for a product category. The technology is being adapted into solutions that address an ever-broader range of applications. Document printing was the primary focus at Drupa 2008, but industrial/wide-format solutions were also prevalent.