It was not until the middle part of the first decade of the 21st century that color inkjet began to develop any significant market share in the drop-on-demand color inkjet printing of labels. Since then, many key players with inkjet pedigrees – Durst, Domino, Epson, Konica Minolta, etc – have launched, and continued to develop updated higher performance color inkjet label presses. Other inkjet presses and the first hybrid conventional/digital label presses also all came into the label market place in the post-millennium period.

Today, digital color label printing is commonplace, almost worldwide. Whether toner or inkjet, it has become an established part of the label, and increasingly package, printing plant. Advances in the past ten to fifteen years have certainly seen digital label presses become ever more reliable, faster, wider and able to produce a quality of printing accepted by pretty-well all major end users and brands.

From just a couple of digital presses that could have been considered by the label converter in the late 1990s, there are now more than a dozen or so digital toner or inkjet presses to choose from.

Compared to conventional label printing presses using flexo, UV flexo, offset or letterpress, these latest digital presses offer enhanced outputs and a higher breakeven, and their quality color output is today accepted by thousands of end-user customers worldwide in all kinds of applications and in a wide range of run lengths.

Add to that the greater understanding by converters of how to integrate digital printing into a flexo or conventional printing and converting plant, of how to meet new and changing customer demands for personalization, producing random numbering, product differentiation, variability or brand protection, and also that it is undoubtedly now possible for most converters to make money with digital printing, and it can soon be recognized why digital label printing has now become a key mainstream printing process − alongside flexo/UV flexo in particular.