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Wow – what a fantastic start to the year! I am as pleased as Christmas punch to be part of this HP wide-format blogging thing. And right now, following the Christmas festivities and obligatory year-end revels, I am feeling pretty wide-format myself. But hey, wide-format is the new black, right?

With not much prospect of me heading towards narrow-format anytime soon, it's clear that the future is definitely wide-format. And this doesn't just apply to me, because this technology creates all sorts of opportunities for people to express themselves in all sorts of new, wide-format ways. The buzz and excitement of what people can do with this sizzling technology is matched only by the commercial opportunities. Take a wide-format printer, add a dash of on-demand customer lust, pepper liberally with website magic, and voila: the readies should start to flow. The formula may be simple, but getting there isn't easy.

So printers with the sense to know that they need new revenue opportunities as part of their digital reinvention must start cosying up to the idea of wide-format services. Without some sort of short-run, on-demand digital printing string to their commercial printing bows, printers have no way of competing with the arriviste entrepreneurs who are getting into this field.

The arrivistes recognise that wide-format printing technologies allow them to produce pretty much anything their customers want, from family posters to personalised Christmas banners – so much more interesting than a morbid holly wreath on your front door!

So now's the time for printers to start plotting their wide-format futures. Not more chocolate, tinsel, mince pies and Lebkuchen, but how you sell those wide-format Christmas novelties and what technology you are going to need in order to produce them to create the next big thing in print!