By Marc Bussanich, Assistant Editor, October 16, 2009

McCormick Place in Chicago is the largest convention space in the country, which made it a fitting site to accommodate the heavy and sophisticated hardware displayed at the Print ’09 show. The production and graphic print industry’s seminal event ran from September 11 to September 16, and numerous print manufacturers and software developers that create print production workflows displayed their wares on 369,000 square feet of exhibition space.

Most of the office imaging equipment manufacturers were at the event, including Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Océ, Ricoh and Xerox. While the product managers discussed how their respective company’s production products matched up against the competition, they also stressed that advances in digital print technology are “nipping at the heels of the offset world” for short-run, variable data printing. In turn, product managers from offset press heavyweights such as Heidelberg, KBA, KOMORI and Muller Martini, along with some commercial printers, boasted that advances in offset technology are reducing the pre-press time to print shorter runs. Clearly emerging from the show was that commercial printers need to rely on both forms of technology because of their customers’ varied print requests. 

But some buyers at the show were in the market solely for digital print solutions. Representatives from major outsourcing companies that process customer transactions for the financial services industry included First Data (www.firstdata.com), DST Systems (www.dstsystems.com), Fiserv (www.fiserv.com) and CSG Systems (www.csgsystems.com), which serves the cable and communications industries. To attract those buyers, each of the office imaging manufacturers’ production divisions displayed unique hardware and software solutions.

Original News : Canon