The Drupa Print Trade Show is the Olympics of the printing industry that is held every four years in Dusseldorf, Germany. This fantastic trade fair is an eleven-day show that is the world’s biggest and most important trade fair for print and cross media solutions. Members of our team attended this past June, bringing back valuable information on innovations in the printing field and the scoop on new technologies from our trusted supplier Konica Minolta. This show is an excellent opportunity for our team to connect with suppliers and get a handle on new technologies, trends, and innovations –all in the interest of better serving our clients.
What is Drupa About?
Drupa is the largest printing equipment expo in the world. The name Drupa comes from a mashup of the German words for print and paper. The show has been going on since the early 1950s and continues to attract the biggest names in the printing industry. This year’s show featured nearly 2000 exhibitors from more than 50 countries and over 260,000 visitors–including the Commonwealth team. Commonwealth strives to stay at the cutting edge of the international printing scene and to bring our knowledge of and experience home to our clients in the D.C. metropolitan regions, and sending a team to Drupa is one of the best ways to accomplish this important goal.
Konica Minolta at Drupa
As our valued customers know, Commonwealth Digital is a proud dealer of Konica Minolta printing equipment. Konica Minolta’s contribution to the expansion of the digital printing market cannot be overstated, and as you’d expect, the company has an impressive presence at Drupa.
This year, Konica Minolta offered visitors a 26,000 square foot booth–the company’s largest ever. This amazing space was the perfect place to celebrate advances in industrial printing. Some of Konica Minolta’s highlights at the show included the debut of its new Accurio line, including the AccurioJet KM-1, a digital inkjet press, offering the largest sheet size in its class (23 x 29.5 inches), prints up to 3,000 per hour and offers an incredible resolution of 1,200 x 1,200 dpi. This printer wowed our team with unprecedented image quality and glossiness.
In the packaging production realm, Konica Minolta introduced its Bizhub C71cf label printer, which produces gorgeous, brilliant labels for commercial print businesses and in-plant labeling. We were impressed by this tool’s fast speed and user friendliness.
The Konica Minolta booth provided an excellent networking opportunity for our team to engage with our trusted supplier. We came home with great ideas to pass on to our valued clients.
Trends and Innovations at Drupa
At Commonwealth Digital, we take pride in monitoring the latest trends in paper and 3D printing. We’d like to share some of the coolest innovations we spotted at Drupa:
- 3D printers that bring together printing and engineering by printing electronic circuits
- Printed solar cells that capture solar energy on paper
- Artificial skin for skin grafts made out of paper
- Smart labels that let consumers trace food from its origins
These amazing developments and so many others took our breath away, and we are thrilled at the new doors that are consistently opening in the printing field.
Packaging Production and Commonwealth
Packaging production (printing labels, boxes, and other types of packaging) is one of the most important and fascinating divisions at Drupa. The advances made in this area are significant and allow businesses to bring packaging needs (printing boxes and labels) in-house rather than outsourcing. With new technology from Konica Minolta, our clients can create packaging quickly and efficiently and at a lower cost than outsourcing. We encourage our clients to talk with us about packaging production options.
Commonwealth Digital: Sharing What We Learn
Drupa 2016 was a fascinating and productive experience for the Commonwealth Digital team. We look forward to attending again in 2020. Meanwhile, we can’t wait to share what we’ve learned with our clients and continuing to help them thrive in the ever-changing world of printing technology.