It has been a busy end to summer. On September 1, Louie Pastor took the reins as president and COO of Xerox, succeeding John Bruno, who is moving on to greener pastures as a CEO somewhere else. About a month earlier, Xerox had announced a cutsheet inkjet production printing partnership with Kyocera, which Scott Cullen, our contributor, covers as he delves into how inkjet technology is reshaping the production printing landscape. Meanwhile, Tetsuo Kubo of OA Life looks into Epson’s expanded, high-speed inkjet MFP applications in the Japanese marketplace.
More broad in scope is Cullen’s cover story—addressing equipment “right sizing” in terms of light production versus full production printing. Noel Ward, another of our writers, unearths some in-plant printing treasures into which dealers might want to dig deeper.
Xerox and Kyocera Document Solutions, however, are not the only OEMs making news. Check out this recent headline from Japan: “Konica Minolta Launches Inline Pretreatment Ink ‘O‘ROBE’ for Reactive Dyes”
Environmental sustainability is one of the macro trends driving transformation in the direct-to-garment (DTG), textile printing industry. Konica Minolta’s ink development reduces energy consumption by shortening the printing process on the OEM’s NASSENGER series of inkjet printers. But why does this matter to dealerships in our world?
Production Printing 2.0: $5 Billion in Textile Potential Is Coming
As DTF and other digital print equipment continues to become more affordable and accessible, more players are entering the print-on-demand (POD) arena. Some channel naysayers continue to snicker at Frank Cannata’s notion, but our founder firmly is sticking to his guns, contending that progressive dealers with open minds soon will be laughing all the way to the bank. He projects that the U.S. market for textile printing could reach $5 billion as early as late 2032. (See Frank’s textile report.)
At North America’s upcoming PRINTING United Expo in Orlando (October 22-24), nearly half of the 700 or so exhibitors will set up apparel/textile “shop” on the tradeshow floor. These booths represent approximately half of the exposition’s floor space (355,000 square feet in total) within the Orange County Convention Center.
In the meantime, we extend our collective congratulations to those dealers who have embraced production print and are doing an excellent job of it. Inside, we interview Systel Business Equipment (in the Southeast: North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) and Pulse Technology (Schaumburg, Illinois, near Chicago), which are succeeding at making production printing an integral part of their businesses. Filomena Tamburri, a new contributor to The Cannata Report, brings us up to speed on the latest with Flex Technology Group and a leadership transition at its California operations.
Last but definitely not least, we had the honor of interviewing Chris Brown, a U.S. Navy medic who served our country during several American military conflicts throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Now an IT supervisor at Impact Networking’s USO center in Lake Forest, Illinois (north of Chicago), Brown is a finalist for our 2025 Outstanding Veteran Award.
For those who would like to enter the production print arena, Frank encourages you to consider going to the PRINTING United Expo in Orlando next month. “Attending tradeshows like this is how you learn,” he believes. As Ben Franklin, printer and statesman, once said: “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
