Inkjet’s Next Gear: Pragmatism, Pace and Platforms at LabelExpo 2025
This article is inspired by a recent podcast interview with Richard Darling, Director of Sales and Marketing at GIS. You can check out the podcast here.
If you walked LabelExpo with your eyes open, you’ll have seen it: no single headline-grabbing “ta-da” moment, but a market that’s growing up. Inkjet in labels is moving from *if* to *how - how fast, how flexible, how fit-for-purpose*. That’s the shift Richard Darling sees up close. Richard’s been immersed in inkjet for some time—Xaar, Ricoh, now at GIS—and he still talks about printheads with the enthusiasm of a startup founder. The difference is, he’s spent years making real-world systems behave for real-world production. That pragmatism matters.
Click on the image above to listen to the podcast
LabelExpo: more muscle, less noise
Barcelona was busy. Not just with bodies, but with intent. Obviously single-pass dominated, and crucially, inkjet label is becoming far more compelling at all investment levels. Gallus showing an entry-level concept? That changes the conversation. Dantex and China’s Pulisi leaning in? Same story. Lower barriers, production-grade expectations. More choice for converters who need to be agile ‘and’ reliable.
We also saw what many of us know but don’t always say out loud: the badge on the fascia isn’t the whole story. European sounding brands front-of-house, Asian engineering backstage. Korea’s 24/7 problem-solving culture is shortening development loops. China's adaptable approach - offering choices like "which printhead would you like?"—is disrupting traditional, rigid models. Net effect: speed isn’t only metres per minute; it’s time to develop product and time to profit.
Digital and analogue: both have jobs to do
Let’s skip the tech fundamentalism. Flexo and rotary screen are superb at long, repeatable jobs with ruthless unit economics. They will continue to be. Inkjet wins with agility, variable data and versioning, fast market tests, late-stage customisation, smaller lots with real brand impact. There’s overlap, yes, but there’s also a healthy division of labour. Smart converters are configuring for optionality, not ideology.
Global market reality: “best fit” beats “best in abstract”
We’re living through the aftermath of one-size-fits-all globalisation. Energy cost, carbon and resilience now shape where things are made. India is accelerating domestic capability under a determined and coherent “Make in India” umbrella. China has moved from the world’s factory towards a system architect. Europe remains outstanding at integration and process finesse. The US still punches above its weight in patents and IP—but too often lets others actually realise innovations.
What wins in this environment? The *best fit* for the job: capital cost you can justify, quantifiable and predictable risk, platforms you can commission quickly, stacks you can support locally, and partners who deliver when things get messy at 5pm on a Friday!
Will there be another “ceramics moment”?
According to Richard, the short answer: no. The ceramics decoration sector embraced inkjet at breakneck speed. But the ceramic tile boom was a perfect storm: Financial crisis and construction slump, push production, over-stocked analogue workflows, fashion-driven, time-sensitive tile designs and an inkjet process that enabled pull, print on demand, and was simultaneously cheaper and better. A finite number of lines converted, machines and heads that lasted, and then a replacement cycle.
Functional printing (batteries, electronics, conductive inks) is exciting and valuable, but it’s not a scale volume play, like ceramic and label. Value there is in precision and yield, not in thousands of lines consuming printheads.
Where the action is now: make cleverness buyable and workable
The inkjet industry isn’t short of brains and creativity. It is short of what Richard describes as ‘packaged capability’. All the elements of technology that fit together to create an inkjet process are often not user-ready and leave opportunity for integration to be less than optimum. Better packaging of inkjet elements can make development faster and better in delivering processes that ordinary people and teams, without 20 years of experience and a PhD, can deploy, operate and maintain. To tame the variability of fluids and environments and to compensate for variations within and between printheads, etc., drive electronics and ink systems with associated software need to be clever inside, but it could be designed to seem simple on the outside.
GIS, in common with many other inkjet players, has not been great at making it simple, but this is most definitely the direction of travel: a move from bespoke heroics to standard, comprehensible modules. Translate “we can fix it” into “you can use it”. That means:
Deterministic printhead drive and characterisation. Drops behave on Monday morning in winter the same way as they do on a summer Thursday afternoon.
Rock-solid ink delivery. Temperatures, flows and pressures, filtration, degassing - engineered out of the drama category for the widest possible operating window.
Closed-loop visibility. Better process monitoring, detection, reporting and compensation so the line self-corrects before image quality drifts.
Operator-level UX. Prioritise essential controls, minimise unnecessary elements, and facilitate rapid achievement of initial results.
Guided openness. Keep component choice and vendor flexibility without handing operators a science project.
The challenge is to reduce the main killer risks in any digital programme: equipment development time, commissioning drag, then coping with operational drift and minimizing scrap and downtime.
Competition is good—if you’re ready
As Chinese and Korean platforms incorporate more of the nice features, in price positions closer to entry-level, or at least in the bottom half of the pyramid, established premium incumbents will differentiate on uptime, lifetime cost and application polish. Words and promise won’t be enough; the uptime, performance and quality bar is rising. Parodying Forest Gump, good is as good does: The brand and the badge count for very little in comparison with the real experience. Buyers know what they need and what they can get.
Analogue is not the competitor. Users know well which technology suits what, the pros and cons. Competition is digital versus digital. Expect more hybrid lines that blend analogue strengths with digital variability; more workflow and data in the loop (proof, correction, routing, reporting); and much sharper ROI conversations.
What brand owners should do next
Use digital where agility pays. Get real packaging into market tests quickly. Version intelligently. Push customisation as a commercial lever, not a ‘look at me’ marketing gimmick. Keep analogue where it is unbeatable. Build dual-track plans that switch volume to the right process for the right thing at the right moment. Tying sustainability narratives to actual reductions in waste, transport and energy isn’t a bad idea - digital can help. However, fundamentalist dreams of a digital conquest over traditional print means are deluded. Pragmatism and stability are key.
What converters should do next
Select the equipment builder as well as the equipment, pick partners with whom you can build a relationship. Check the bench strength behind the demo. There are many options with many more spec. sheets. Is the one with the biggest numbers always the best – speed, resolution, number of colours. Perhaps there should be some recognition that most consumers might struggle to tell the difference between a CMYK 360dpi print and a 1200dpi with extra gamut: However, print defects are immediately spotted. Question which specification makes defects most likely and how easy it is to keep a system running.
Spec sheets rarely measure the boring stuff; scrap, energy, risk of unplanned downtime, (real) printhead performance and life expectancy, nozzle recovery effectiveness. These can turn out to be more critical than the headline performance figures in determining success.
What equipment suppliers should do next
Package your brilliance to make faster adoption possible. Reduce the number of “unknowns” at install and in running. Don’t overreach for wow performance. As the market matures there are positions for the pinnacle of cleverness and complexity but there are now positions for entry-level, mid-range or whatever. Buyers are clever enough to know that good enough is best.
Honesty about digital limitations and where analogue is still the right answer will earn more trust (and ultimately more revenue) by helping customers build balanced capabilities.
Richard laughs about being teased for “loving printheads.” But it’s telling. The glamour is easy; the grind is where value gets created. Industrial inkjet’s next leap isn’t a moonshot—it’s coherence. Heads, inks, electronics, software and mechanics that behave predictably across substrates, seasons and shifts. Systems that commission quickly, run stably and pay back faster.
That’s progress. Fewer hero launches. More lines that just work. And in a market that prizes reliability over rhetoric, that might be the most disruptive move of all.