Beyond Aqueous Printing: Alternative Inks on the Rise

While numerous ink technologies are employed within the large-format printing business, historically, aqueous (water)-based wide-format printers have represented the largest number of printers installed. Even today, few would argue that large-format aqueous inkjet printers are the most affordable and application-flexible printers on the market. However, we’re starting to see the impact of single-pass wide-format aqueous inkjet printers as they have dramatically improved speed and lowered running costs, two of the biggest challenges to conventional aqueous inkjet use in the graphics market.

Most of these single-pass wide-format aqueous inkjet printers are used in the technical or CAD market, but based on the speed the models are capable of, the potential exists for shops and end users to buy them to produce high volumes of maps and short-term posters. For the North American graphics market, the trend is moving away from conventional aqueous inkjet due to high running cost as well as limited outdoor durability. Certainly, pigmented water-based inks are resistant to UV light, but for true outdoor durability, aqueous inkjet prints must be laminated.

Here at International Data Corporation (IDC), we have seen the shipments of conventional aqueous inkjet printers designed for the graphics market fall by about 3500 units from 2013 to 2015, and we expect those declines to continue. Alternative ink technologies such as eco-solvent, latex, UV curable, and dye sublimation offer improved outdoor durability, lower running costs, and the ability to print onto uncoated media. These add up to a different set of capabilities, which enable a variety of new applications and require different operational cost models and production speeds.

What’s Growing in the Market

Eco-solvent inkjet printers have become one of the primary tools for the production of signs, banners, decals, vehicle graphics, and other applications that require high image quality and outdoor durability. Eco-solvent is the leading technology for sign shops in North America – of which there are tens of thousands – and eco-solvent inkjet printers continue to improve in terms of print speed and image quality. The improvement in the technology and the overall growth of key applications such as vehicle graphics has increased new eco-solvent inkjet printer shipments by almost 20 percent from 2013 to 2015. The two major limitations for eco-solvent technology are dry time and the emission of VOCs from the inks when the solvent-based fluid is drying. IDC believes that 2015 was something of a turning point for the eco-solvent segment as print shops continue to seek alternatives. This is coming as no surprise to the top manufacturers of eco-solvent inkjet printers, all of which have embraced new ink platforms such as UV, latex, and dye sublimation to replace the growth in the eco-solvent segment.

Due to its price point and speed range, the technology that’s most often compared to eco-solvent inkjet is latex. With comparable running costs, image quality, and print speed capabilities, latex removes the other two limitations of eco-solvent. The strong feature set, low cost, and aggressive promotion of latex (particularly by HP, the primary provider of the technology) has increased shipments by more than 1000 units from 2013 to 2015. That’s almost a 100-percent increase in shipments from 2013 levels.

Large-format printers utilizing UV-curable inkjet are also seeing strong growth as shops seek ways to increase productivity, reduce operating cost, and print onto a wider range of substrates. UV-curable inkjet printers are typically larger and more expensive, so the scale of shipments is much smaller than other technologies (hundreds as opposed to thousands). But UV-curable inkjet is experiencing strong growth as manufacturers are driving down the cost of highly capable printers, even while the image quality and production speeds increase. From 2013 to 2015, large-format UV-curable inkjet printer shipments grew by almost 20 percent. While we expect that pace to slow a bit from 2015 to 2017, the development of small-format flatbed UV-curable inkjet printers, used for printing many things that formerly would have been pad printed, is expected to drive the growth of new shipments at a double-digit rate over the next several years.

The dye-sublimation ink segment is also really making things happen right now. This is particularly interesting because while dye-sublimation ink is well established in the marketplace, many of the printers that have been sold in this segment in the past have been modified aqueous or eco-solvent inkjet printers. Now, key manufacturers have embraced dye-sublimation inkjet because they recognize the growing demand for fabric printing, for which dye sublimation is particularly strong. Special finishing equipment and processes such as sewing and seaming will likely be required by those that go into the dye-sub business, so it remains something of a niche in terms of the scale of total shipments relative to other technologies. Still, there are now hundreds more large-format dye-sub printers shipping than there were just a few years ago, and IDC expects those shipments to grow at close to a 10-percent rate from 2015 to 2017.

The effect of these technology shifts is that the overall large-format print volume is expected to change as well. Over time, “alternative” ink technologies take on a larger and larger share.

As the large-format graphics market matures, the need for print shops to look for alternative ink technologies increases. Shops seeking growth should be looking for ways to incorporate these alternative ink systems to enable new applications, therefore creating new lines of business.

Read more from our May 2016 “Running the Tables” issue.