The missions delegates a group of UK printers including ProCo, Cyclic, HenDI, Datagraphic and Buckingham Colour Group visited a cluster of key digital printers and the global headquarters of Xerox and Kodak NexPress together with major printing college Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), to look at the ways in which the US print industry had adopted digital printing and the future of the various on-demand technologies.

In exclusive meetings with technology experts at RIT, the mission learned that the Institute forecasts that the largest growth sector of digital printing in the next five years will be data-driven variable colour printing, with trans-promo documents (transactional print with marketing messages attached) expected to be a major part of this growth.

The mission was also introduced to a new breed of on-demand printer in North America, including the New York State-based firm ColorCentric, a short-run book producer working entirely through VARs and ASPs such as lulu.com, Google and Amazon.

Their average number of jobs processed in a day is around 6,000 and their average run length is 1.8 books, mission delegate Scotch Kirkpatrick, managing director of Datagraphic, told the seminar.

The delegates discussed the implications for the UK digital colour market, including the immediate boost to the litho market from adding digital facilities and the need to attract salespeople who are both capable and technologically focused .

In the US, digital sales representatives are younger and have degrees, and they can sell up the tree, past the print buyers and into the project managers, said Richard Knowles (pictured) of Buckingham Colour Group.