Through we don’t normally find drupa much associated with wide-formats, like the way we see in niche signage exhibitions, this year the world’s largest printing expo brought up more than we expected in the areas overlapping with wide-format display applications. Of course, a group of renowned wide-format brands marked impressive presence in the recent drupa 2016, showing arrays of innovative and upgraded signage-graphic printing solutions. But in addition to that, a number of offset players presenting corrugated board printing technologies during the expo, particularly for packaging segment, showed their applications applicable for display graphics as well.

In an overall observation, what all some offset players showing in the corrugated packaging domain clearly indicated that new and evolving technologies have been developed paying equal attention to wideformat graphic applications. This means, wide-format has found a new room in the corrugated packaging segment. The indication here is the way companies engaging in corrugated packaging production may able to pick up jobs related to signage graphics, for example, retail displays, POPs or such projects from brand owners and others. Further, the point is about utilisation of technologies for two or more applications that complement each other. And this was what those presenting corrugated printing technologies clearly articulated at drupa 2016.

And yet another domain at the show common with signage was functional or industrial printing. Showing some fresh opportunities in this rapidly progressive segment, drupa 2016 had revealed tremendous industrial printing applications overlapping with display graphic productions. Industrial printing technologies are designed to print on unconventional materials, such as ceramic, tile, wood and glass, which may not necessarily be wide-format in terms of sizes; but it opens up a big new market in the signage domain and drupa 2016 presented many of such prospects. And the overall emphasis is to maximize productivity and versatility.

In this issue, under our regular ‘Region Exclusive’ column, we cover Siliguri town in West Bengal. Being situated in a strategically networked geography on the foothill of the eastern Himalayan range, the town provides its signage firms a privilege to pull customers from its neighbouring areas, such as Darjeeling, Gangtok, Nepal, Bhutan and many others. With such geographic advantage, signage firms in Siliguri foresee a steep future market growth and planning to go for advanced machines and technologies. We wish them all ‘success’ in their future endeavours!

– Sonal Khurana
sonal@smediagroup.in