Not Much Direct-To or Digital Printing Used

The low numbers among all of the aforementioned technologies as both threats and opportunities indicate that they are not major concerns as yet for most printing companies. For example, with regard to the actual implementation of both direct-to-press and digital color printing, in both cases the vast majority of firms responding to TrendWatch surveys haven't implemented them at all in the past 12 months.

A total of 84% of printers said that they didn't do direct-to-press printing, while 81% didn't engage in digital color printing. On the plus side, 9% say that direct-to-press work either is increasing a little or a lot, while 12% of firms say that digital color printing is either increasing a little or a lot.

All of this fits into a general pattern akin to a scene from the Steven Spielberg film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," in which a group of air traffic controllers are tracking an unidentified flying object on their radar. Aircraft in the vicinity are reporting strange lights, and air traffic control is monitoring something, but no one knows just what it is. That scene could in many ways be a metaphor for the printing industry and its perception of new technologies—there's something there, it's starting to appear on printers' radar, but no one is quite sure what to make of it.

In the end, customer demand will determine how close printers' encounters will be with these technologies. For many technologies, at least at the moment, there is not a lot of demand ushering printers toward direct-to printing technologies or Internet services.