Digital Production Color Entering Rapid Growth Phase, Future Technological Innovations Transforming Industry

The digital production color market will grow 20% a year through the end of the decade, creating radical shifts in revenue and page volume and transforming the face of the printing industry. In a new study entitled the impact of digital production color technologies and examine industry transformation.

The market for digital color is currently generating over 58 billion pages in the U.S., and results in over 42,000 annual hardware placements in production environments. This production market purchases $4.46 billion in digital color equipment, service, and supplies (excluding paper), and generates almost $25 billion in retail value of print.

After examining literally thousands of pages of data, we believe that the digital production market is entering the high growth phase in terms of technology adoption. To paraphrase Geoffrey Moore, we are ‘Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado’.

This growth will be enabled by future technological innovations that will address a broader range of market requirements. This new equipment will not only bring in revenue in terms of placements, but will also increase the number of pages printed on color devices, as these devices will cost-effectively produce monochrome and full-color pages.

In fact, forecasts indicate that monochrome volume printed on color devices will increase from 7.1 billion pages in 2004 to 23.8 billion by 2009, representing a compound annual growth rate of 23.8%.

This trend towards what we call ‘universal’ devices will have a negative impact on black & white digital devices and offset presses as total investment dollars are finite.

The Evolving U.S. Digital Color On Demand Printing Opportunity, Publ 20060206