The next industrial inkjet wave may be round, curved - and moving fast

This article is inspired by a recent podcast with Ken Stack from EPS, you can listen to the podcast here.

Industrial inkjet has spent the past two decades proving itself in one market after another. Wide format was once dismissed as too limited to displace analogue methods, before becoming overwhelmingly digital. Textiles followed a similar path. Ceramics did too. In each case, the pattern was familiar: the technology improved, market pressures mounted, and a once-niche digital process moved rapidly up the adoption curve.

Ken Stack believes direct-to-object printing is now reaching that same moment.

Stack, chairman of Engineered Printing Solutions (EPS) and one of the industry’s longest-standing experts of industrial inkjet, has seen these transitions before. Over more than 30 years, he has built companies, sold one - Jetrion - to EFI, advised on more than a billion dollars’ worth of inkjet-related deals through Proximus, and watched multiple print segments move from scepticism to scale. His conclusion today is unusually clear: direct-to-object, or DTO, is on the verge of hypergrowth.

That matters because DTO remains one of the few substantial print sectors that has not yet undergone a full analogue-to-digital transition. And because, unlike some earlier digital print stories, the case is not being built on novelty. It is being built on labour, automation and return on investment.

The last big analogue holdout

Direct-to-object sounds self-explanatory, but the market is broader and more complex than it first appears. It covers printing directly onto three-dimensional products rather than onto a label or flat substrate. These can range from pharmaceutical and beverage caps to golf balls, helmets, saw blades, lids, bottles and electrical components.

Historically, much of this work has been done using pad printing, screen printing or direct offset. These are mature, effective technologies, and in many applications they have served industry well for decades. But they also come with familiar constraints: labour-intensive set-up, complex changeovers, plate management, consumable waste, and a poor fit with a market increasingly defined by shorter runs and higher variation.

As Stack notes, this is not a theoretical problem. The pressure is operational and immediate. Manufacturers need to move faster, switch jobs more often, and do so with fewer skilled workers than they once had available. In that context, the appeal of digital is not principally aesthetic. It is structural.

Labour, not ink, is the real economic driver

One of the more striking themes in Stack’s argument is that the dominant ROI driver is not what many might expect. It is not primarily about reducing ink waste or eliminating plates, though both help. It is labour.

That is a point worth dwelling on. The industrial print sector often talks about automation in abstract terms, but Stack frames the economics more bluntly. Labour inflation, he argues, is running far ahead of general inflation. The total burden cost of a manufacturing employee - wages, training, benefits and overhead - can be substantial. If one digital production cell can remove four or five roles tied to conventional printing changeovers and manual intervention, the savings become decisive.

In other words, digital DTO is not only a print story. It is a labour-substitution story.

That distinction helps explain why the market now looks different. Previous generations of digital direct-to-object systems existed, but they were typically multi-pass devices better suited to very short-run promotional work. They could personalise a phone case or produce small batches of merchandise, but they did not match industrial throughput. For manufacturers producing packaging components or consumer products by the thousand, they were too slow to matter strategically.

The inflection point comes when digital reaches production speed.

Why single pass changes the equation

The significance of EPS reaching its hundredth single-pass DTO production system is, in that sense, more than a corporate milestone. It is evidence that the technology has crossed an important threshold.

In single-pass printing, the printheads remain fixed while objects move beneath them. That contrasts with multi-pass systems, where printheads travel back and forth over the object. The advantage is speed - and in industrial manufacturing, speed is not a luxury. It is the condition of relevance.

EPS’s systems, Stack says, can print up to 2,000 plastic caps per minute, while other applications run at hundreds of objects per minute. At those levels, digital begins to address real production demand rather than adjacent promotional niches.

This is when industrial markets typically start to move. As Stack points out, superwide-format printing took off when it replaced numerous smaller devices with far faster production units. Textile printing followed the same logic. Ceramics did too. In each case, markets accelerated once digital was fast enough to support the economics of mainstream manufacturing.

Direct-to-object now appears to be entering that phase.

Printing is only a fraction of the system

Yet DTO also differs from other digital print segments in one important respect: the printing itself is often not the hardest part.

For Stack, the real challenge - and the real moat - is automation. A production DTO system must do far more than place ink on a surface. It must pick up objects from pallets, boxes or conveyors, orient and space them correctly, pre-treat them for adhesion, print them at line speed, inspect them, reject faults, and re-sort them for shipment. In many cases, the printer accounts for only a minority of the total system cost.

That observation is revealing. In most digital print conversations, the print engine dominates. In DTO, the print engine may be only 20% of the investment. The rest is motion control, handling, machine vision, inspection and workflow engineering.

This is why Stack resists describing EPS simply as a printer company. The company, he says, builds manufacturing cells that decorate. That phrasing matters because it points to the way value is being created. The differentiator is not merely the ability to print onto a curved or awkward object. It is the ability to do so within a fully automated industrial process.

That also explains why the market is so fragmented and so difficult. Unlike labels, where most substrates and workflows share broad similarities, DTO spans a diverse set of verticals. Printing on a golf ball is not the same as printing on a hard hat, or on a saw blade, or on a bottle cap. Surface energies differ. Geometries differ. Handling requirements differ. The inkjet technology platform may remain broadly common, but the automation wrapped around it often changes substantially by application.

Why now - and why North America first

Stack is particularly bullish on North America. Part of that is the familiar combination of labour shortages, labour costs and demand for automation. Part is also tied to wider industrial policy and economics: reshoring, capital spending, and a broader willingness among manufacturers to invest in systems that reduce dependence on labour and increase production flexibility.

Asia and Latin America, he suggests, are also showing strong momentum. Europe looks more hesitant.

That is an uncomfortable point for a European audience, especially given Europe’s long history as a cradle of industrial inkjet innovation. But Stack’s view is that while the need is undoubtedly there - perhaps intensified by multilingual packaging and shorter production runs - the mood is more cautious. Geopolitical uncertainty, tighter access to financing, and a more risk-averse approach to capital expenditure appear to be slowing adoption.

Whether that gap persists remains to be seen. The logic of DTO - agility, automation, reduced labour dependence, fewer changeovers - arguably plays well to the kind of disruption European manufacturers now face. But the difference in investment confidence is notable.

The next bottlenecks: automation, printheads and fluids

If the technology is ready, where does the next wave of improvement come from? Stack’s answer is threefold.

First, automation needs to become cheaper, easier and simpler to deploy. In some applications, inkjet is already faster than the surrounding mechanical system. That is a rare reversal in industrial print, where print speed is usually the limiting factor. Training inspection systems, handling diverse objects reliably, and lowering the complexity of robotic set-up are therefore central to expanding the market further.

Second, printhead performance will continue to matter, particularly in extending printable gaps and enabling more challenging shapes and geometries. The further a system can reliably print across a gap, the broader the range of objects it can address.

Third, fluid development remains essential. The future of DTO depends not just on speed but on the ability to adhere to difficult substrates such as powder-coated metals and specialised plastics. More aggressive, more versatile fluids widen the application base and reduce the number of products that sit outside digital’s reach.

Still, Stack’s most interesting point may be that these are, in large part, expansion opportunities rather than prerequisites. For the majority of customers approaching EPS today, he argues, current technology is already good enough. The question is no longer whether digital DTO can work. It is whether the ROI is compelling enough to justify the capital purchase.

That is a very different stage of market maturity.

From curiosity to capital decision

For years, direct-to-object digital printing has lived partly as a curiosity - technically impressive, commercially intriguing, but often seen as specialist. Stack’s confidence suggests that period is ending.

The ingredients are in place. The market is large. The labour problem is real. The technology has reached production speed. The applications are broad. And firms like EPS bring not only print technology but decades of applications knowledge, automation engineering and manufacturing credibility.

That is usually when a market stops asking whether something is possible and starts asking how fast it can scale.

For industrial inkjet, the next growth story may not be a roll of media or a flat sheet. It may be a cap, a helmet or a golf ball - moving at speed, under a stationary printhead, in a factory that suddenly needs fewer hands than before.