Friday, September 12, 2014

InfoTrends' Predictions on Wide-Format Printing

Tim Greene is Director of InfoTrends’ Wide Format Printing Consulting Service, and, on September 1st, he posted an article on myprintresource, “Market Intelligence; What Can We Expect Now?”

It’s a well written article, and here’s the beginning of that article:

InfoTrends' forecasts on the wide-format digital printing market have just been published and there are a few key points that we want to explain to the market that put some of our projections into context. We forecast on a technology by technology basis, but as readers know there is a clear overlap or intersection between some of the production wide-format printing technologies available today. The forecasts also cover the wide-format technical and graphics markets, and while there are a few similarities, there are some huge differences between the ways these two key segments of the wide-format market work now.
Blog Publisher’s further comments:

Take a look at the bar chart – wide-format technical print volume - that appears on the first page of Tim’s article – that’s the bar chart that shows InfoTrends’ predictions as to the total volume of sq ft that was or will be produced, 2013 through 2018. 

Key takeaways from that chart:

-The overall total volume of wide-format technical document printing has declined and will continue to decline

-The portion of the total volume handled by ink-jet printers has grown and will continue to grow, continuing to reduce the total volume handled by LED printers

I disagree with InfoTrends’ predictions in one particular sense.  I DO THINK that, after HP releases (next year) its ink-jet based “pagewide” technical document printers, the percentage of the total volume handled by ink-jet vs. LED will grow much greater than the bar chart predicts.  I would not be at all surprised if, by 2018, LED output is less than 20% of the overall total volume of technical document output.  And, it could well be less than that!  I DO THINK that HP’s “pagewide” technical document printers are going to cause havoc in the LED printer manufacturing market.

Here’s a link to Tim’s excellent article: