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Imaging technologies are facing an ongoing change from analog to digital processes in many applications and markets. At the beginning of the 1990s, monochrome laser printers started to replace impact printers, such as typewriters and matrix printers, in the home and office environment, and were followed shortly by color inkjet printers. While the installed base of monochrome laser printers has reached a plateau, multifunction printers combining scan, fax and print devices as well as cheaper and smaller electrophotographic color printers will grow at approximately 10–15% during the next few years. Analog copiers have been replaced by digital copiers that can be linked to network communications. Diazo printing for the duplication of engineering drawings has been replaced during the same period by large-format electrophotographic laser printers, electrostatic plotters or inkjet printers. With the increased demand of customized, short-run print jobs, offset printing is being increasingly challenged by digital electrophotographic printing presses.
Traditional printing technologies, such as offset lithography, flexography and gravure, and imaging technologies such as silver halide photography will be around for many more years. There are no technologies on the horizon capable of competing with offset lithography or flexography for doing large-run printing (millions of prints) at the same cost and at the same speed, quality and reliability. Therefore, newspaper printing will continue to utilize this technology until well into the twenty-first century.
The tremendous success of digital photography and the decline of analog photography and the silver halide film business has led to a major change in the structure of the imaging and printing industry. The traditional photo film market has been falling by more than 20–30% per year during the past several years, more than double the industry’s initial estimates of about 10% per year. Unable to grow their digital businesses as rapidly as their conventional silver-halide businesses declined, Eastman Kodak, Agfa-Gevaert, Fujifilm, Konica Minolta and Ilford suffered huge losses and have struggled to find solutions for recovery and survival. These photo companies needed to migrate capital quickly out of the declining conventional photo industry and into digital-imaging technologies, and each did this with a different strategy. Most new activities of these companies have been related to inkjet technology.
For the last four decades, electrophotography has been by far the most popular process in the reprographic industry. Xerography with plain paper copiers has accounted for the major share of the hardware and the supplies (toner and photoreceptors) market, but at the beginning of the 1990s copiers were overtaken on a unit basis by laser printers, used mainly for desktop publishing as output devices for computers and word processors. Almost all new installed copiers today are digital, equipped with high-speed scanner and laser printer units—instead of the conventional lens and mirror technology used in analog copying. Stand-alone machines have been replaced by digital machines that can be linked together in networks.
Almost all business personal computers are connected to networks. This has enabled a shift from a print-and-distribute model for information on paper to a distribute-and-print model. The second trend is a shift from copying to the creation of multiple original prints. Most business offices had relied on a stand-alone department office copier as their information distribution hub. With the success of fast and inexpensive laser printers, it has become convenient to print multiple copies of a single document. The growth in digital copiers, however, is deceptive since it represents to a large degree a replacement market for older analog copiers. While in 1999 about 50% of all copies were still being made by analog copiers, approximately 98% were being produced by digital devices in 2006.
At the end of the 1980s there was a boom in demand for thermal fax papers. This was brought to an end by the emergence of laser and inkjet fax machines in the 1990s. By 1992, fax paper consumption had peaked and began to decrease. Nonfax applications have compensated for the decline in thermal fax paper demand and have been able to continuously develop new applications and markets such as tag, ticket and label. Today, this technology dominates ticket, tag and label printing and is showing steady growth and diversity. Point-of-sales is an ever-growing market for thermal printing. Applications include printing of bank statements; car park tickets; receipts from credit card payments in restaurants, hotels and supermarkets; and issuing of tickets for lottery, travel, leisure and sports events. The operation of these printers can be unattended at locations such as gasoline pumps, highway tolls or bus ticketing. The main uses in manufacturing applications are product labeling, inventory control, tracking, shipping as well as receiving, and maintaining of work in progress. Warehousing, transportation and ticketing are also major application areas. Airline luggage tags and boarding passes as well as medical charts have also become interesting markets for the thermal printing industry.
The worldwide market for thermal paper in 2006 was approximately 845 thousand metric tons valued at $1.5–1.6 billion at the producer level. This represents an increase of the thermal paper market of about 9–10% annually over the past four years. Growth rates in the thermal paper market for 2006–2011 are expected to be around 6–8%, with growth rates above average in China at 15%. Consumption in Japan is expected to stagnate.
Photographic technology based on silver halide chemistry is now more than 150 years old and is still unsurpassed as a medium for image capture. Improvements in film technology over the years have enabled higher and higher film speeds, and film performance has improved in terms of image structure, color, and longevity. Photosensitive goods manufacturers have improved conventional film and paper, chemicals and processes in order to attract as many consumers as possible. The core components include new color couplers, more efficient sensitizers and finer silver halogenide grain structures. Today, there are over a hundred chemicals in a typical color negative film. These chemicals do not act independently but rather in hundreds of two-way and higher-order interactions. A piece of color negative film may be among the most complex of man-made chemical devices.
While in 1997 only six digital camera models were available on the market, in 1999 more than 100 models were offered to consumers. Today, more than thirty companies, including photographic goods producers, camera manufacturers, electrical appliance/electronic producers, entertainment companies and others, provide a full product line of digital cameras with resolutions in the range of 4-10 megapixels. This wide market choice, combined with a drop in the prices of digital cameras, standardization in chip design and memory card compatibility, has been fundamental in crossing the threshold from a niche business to the mass consumer market. As in other areas of the electronics industry, the life cycle of digital camera models is very short, often less than twelve months and is coupled with a price decline, as much as 30% over a twelve-month period.
Digital photography has been increasing market penetration in a host of nonconsumer imaging applications such as surveillance, astronomy and medical imaging. Additionally, many mobile phones sold today (70% in Europe, 92% in Japan) are equipped with a camera function and numerous pictures are being shot and sent, but only a very low percentage of these pictures are ever stored or printed. Over the next five years it is expected that these devices will replace single-use cameras to a large extent.
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