Graph Expo Outperforms Expectations

GRAPH EXPO took over Chicago for four days last month, bringing the best of Drupa to U.S. soil. Thousands of printers turned out to see what the 600+ vendors had to show. They saw several striking changes from years past.

For one thing, offset presses were not a dominant sight. Wide-open floor space typified the booths of many offset vendors. Even Heidelberg had just one press on hand, focusing instead on using Prinect to fully integrate a print shop. manroland showed no presses, but highlighted its service contract portfolios.

This contrasted sharply with the booths of digital press manufacturers, which crammed as many machines as possible into their confines. The prevalence of digital printing was also obvious in the floor plan of the exhibition. Heidelberg was in its customary place with a massive booth right at the main entrance, but it was surrounded by very large Kodak, EFI and Xerox booths. Just down the aisle was a similarly large Hewlett-Packard display. All of them occupied the forward portion of the show floor that a few years ago would have been dominated by heavy iron. Also, wide-format and even super-wide/grand-format ink-jet printing systems were given significant square footage by exhibitors offering digital solutions.

Though most products at Graph Expo had been shown last spring at Drupa, noticeably absent were the new color ink-jet presses for page production that grabbed so much attention in D