OUTPUT

Last week at the FESPA Global Summit and press fest, someone asked Neil Felton, managing director of the association, why there might not be any jaw-dropping new technologies at next year's digital event in Barcelona. It was such a daft question that I was moved to jump to my feet and add that it was hardly the responsibility of an exhibition organiser to determine what manufacturers might or might not be developing.

We've said it before. The wide-format digital ink-jet market has matured nicely now, and this means that there's a wide choice of ink technologies and accompanying engines to cater for the needs of most users. There are people, lots of them it seems, wanting to produce narrower jobs; there are others who are taking the superwide-format route or who need faster throughput. But all these investments are now based on accepted and proven platforms with formulations which, in general terms, perform as they should.

So why expect anything new at this juncture? Next year's trade shows and other events aren't expected to be launch pads for exciting revolutionary developments. The emphasis is more on application suitability these days and, surely, it is more encouraging to see existing technologies honed and tweaked to bring a comfort factor to their end users and give them exactly what they need.

We now live in a world of upgrades and refinements, with many of these evolving because of customer feedback and specific requests for a modification here or an enhancement there. After all, these are the people who rely on their digital printing machines to earn them their bread and butter so their opinions are important to the overall future shape of the market.

In the past there have been some strange introductions to the wide-format sector, with bizarre platforms that look as though they will serve little practical purpose than merely to look pretty as they gather dust in a demo area. As the years have passed there have been flurries of launches, usually centred around a major trade event, with many of the odder devices fading rapidly from the public eye and quickly forgotten.

Nowadays we should all be pretty confident that what we see demonstrated carries familiar elements and few surprises. No-one, except the extremely foolhardy, should be prepared to gamble on a technology which promises everything but might deliver nothing.

To the return to the FESPA question, the fact that what we're likely to see in Barcelona is an adjunct to what we know already is encouraging. After all, it's what comes out of a print device which is important, and there are lots of technologies out there which are able to do the job properly.