Digital Drupa - your guide to digital print at the big show

Welcome to the Image Reports & OneStop Digital Drupa, the only mini website officially endorsed by the organiser, Messe Düsseldorf. This four-yearly event in Düsseldorf, Germany, is the world’s largest international trade show dedicated to the printing and paper sectors. In 2004 it attracted almost 395,000 visitors from 127 countries, to see some 1,866 exhibitors.

In the weeks running up to the show’s opening on 29 May, this website will build up a useful guide to the news and rumours of the new products that will be on show, plus the business trends that will be a major theme.

We’ll include relevant links to the main Drupa website including tips on visiting the show, but this Digital Drupa site will be purely concentrated on issues relevant to digital printing, and it will contain unique coverage produced by the OneStop and Image Reports’ specialist editorial teams.

There’s also a Futures section that takes an updated second look at some of our recent coverage on new technologies and market issues that may impinge on the printing industry in the near future.

Drupa now 54 years old, which means it has provided a regular showcase for electronic and digital print technologies as they increasingly grew to prominence in the worldwide printing and publishing industries.

Like its UK counterpart Ipex, Drupa has seen some of the earliest public showings of production-scale xerographic printers, originally monochrome and now full-colour. Models from the likes of HP Indigo, Canon, Konica Minolta, Xeikon and Xerox were first seen in public at Drupa or Ipex.

Drupa has also seen the introduction of increasingly capable high speed reel-fed inkjets, starting with 1995’s narrow-width prototype of what became the Kodak Versamark V-series. If 2004 was the “JDF Drupa,” stressing process automation, 2008’s show is tipped to be the “Ink Jet Drupa,” with a crop of production scale models – Agfa, Kodak, Infoprint, and Screen are already in the market, with Océ the latest entrant. We’re expecting new models at Drupa.

Wide format inkjets are also playing an increased role in this year’s Drupa, as they are increasingly become regarded as mainstream print processes and not just specialist curiosities used by sign makers. The small pioneering developers are steadily being snapped up by the big names in print and pre-press manufacture: in the past few years HP has bought Indigo, Scitex Vision, ColorSpan and NUR, EFI has bought VUTEk, FujiFilm has bought Spectra (inkjet heads) and Sericol (inks), Kodak has bought back Scitex Digital Printing (having sold it to Scitex a decade earlier) and Screen has bought Inca Digital.

Digital Drupa will be your at-a-glance reference to all the news relevant to digital print. We’ll also be covering it in detail in the main printed issues of OneStop and Image Reports magazines. If you’re not receiving regular copies of any of these two titles, please visit ImageReports or OneStop to fill in a registration form. Both these magazines are free to eligible readers, so what have you got to lose?

Melony Rocque
Acting Editor, Image Reports
&
Lesley Simpson
Editor, OneStop