FuturePrint Munich - Industrial Inkjet - A Decade of Development: From potential to powerful ROI

This article is inspired by a recent FuturePrint Podcast with Simon Daplyn of Sun Chemical. You can listen to it by clicking the image below.

To understand the shift, Daplyn rewinds to the early days of InPrint - a rare forum, at the time, for industrial inkjet. Back then, Dr Simon Daplyn was at Xennia Technology, and the marketplace and the wider world looked very different.

Inkjet was established in wide format graphics and gaining traction in textiles, and the ceramic inkjet revolution was accelerating. Industrial manufacturing use-cases existed, but often as prototypes, pilots, or brave experiments driven by specialists.

What InPrint helped catalyse was an ecosystem: integrators capable of combining printheads, ink delivery, software and mechanical handling into bespoke solutions for manufacturers who knew what they wanted to achieve, but not how to build it. It was where inkjet stopped being “a printer” and started becoming a capability that could be engineered into a process.

The intervening decade has accelerated that evolution. The number and quality of printheads has expanded. Reliability has improved. The software stack has matured. Integration expertise has deepened. Robotics and part handling have become central to direct-to-object and direct-to-shape workflows. Even the basics - measuring geometries, controlling throw distance, maintaining registration over complex surfaces - have moved from lab problems to engineering disciplines.

The result, as Daplyn sees it, is a market that is increasingly tangible. Not a promise, but an increasingly complete toolbox.

And crucially, one where collaboration remains the norm.

The hidden truth about ink

Ink is both essential and often misunderstood. It sits at the heart of every inkjet system, yet rarely sets the agenda in the early stages of a project. A printhead gets the headlines. A new machine gets the attention. Ink is assumed to be “solvable”.

In practice, ink is where the whole thing either becomes industrially viable or quietly fails.

Daplyn describes a maturing understanding across the value chain - not just in chemistry, but in how chemistry interacts with waveforms, software, substrate behaviour, and end-use performance requirements. The ink must do more than jet. It must meet standards, survive processes, and deliver function. That might mean adhesion to glass, durability on metal, compatibility with packaging compliance demands, or functional performance in electronics or biomedical contexts.

One of the less discussed drivers has been upstream: raw material suppliers. For years, many materials were designed for screen, flexo or gravure and did not meet inkjet’s demands for purity, particle size consistency, and predictable behaviour. As inkjet has grown, the raw materials “toolbox” has grown with it.

That is what enables expansion into more ambitious applications. Not because the industry suddenly became cleverer, but because the ecosystem matured.

Functional inkjet: the drivers match decor - but the stakes are higher

There is a tendency to treat “functional inkjet” as a fundamentally different proposition to decorative print. Daplyn is more direct: the drivers are not massively different.

This is where the conversation gets interesting. Because it challenges how industrial inkjet is often sold.

He argues that the sector still spends too much time talking about technical detail - viscosities, materials, waveforms, jetting behaviour - and not enough time talking about the business outcome. A manufacturer does not care how you achieve the result. They care that the result is reliable, cost-effective, and improves their operation.

Functional applications often use complex, expensive materials. That makes one inkjet advantage particularly powerful: depositing only where needed, when needed, on demand. It reduces waste. It enables precise placement. It supports tailoring and variability without penalty.

But the broader economic case is just as important. Inkjet can change inventory logic. It can reduce the need to commit to long analogue run lengths. Once a system is set up, the cost difference between printing one metre and ten thousand can be relatively small compared with analogue break-even constraints. That translates into less cash tied up, less warehousing, less obsolescence risk - and faster response to market demand.

In other words, inkjet’s advantage is not simply that it prints. It is that it changes the economics of manufacturing decision-making.

Stop trying to replace analogue - finding the sweet spot!

If there is one mistake Daplyn sees repeatedly, it is this: companies invest in digital and then try to replicate exactly what they do in conventional processes.

That is how you end up disappointed.

Sun Chemical, as a supplier across analogue and digital, takes a deliberately non-ideological view. Analogue processes will remain dominant for many high-volume, repeatable jobs where they are unmatched on unit cost and throughput. Digital inkjet is not a universal replacement. It is a complementary technology.

The value comes from finding the sweet spot - the jobs and workflows where digital flexibility, speed of changeover, reduced waste, or new functionality creates measurable advantage.

A useful way to think about it is to distinguish visible and hidden costs. The visible costs are familiar: ink price per litre, drying energy, workflow adaptation. The hidden costs are what often swing the decision: plate and screen creation, storage and changeover time, inventory commitments, time-to-market pressure, and the growing consumer pull for variation, personalisation and shorter cycles.

Those pressures do not only apply to graphics. They apply to functional deposition too. In medical and life science contexts, for example, inkjet can enable tuned dosage or variable deposition at the individual level - something that is inherently difficult with analogue mass processes.

Why Munich matters: industrial print the next growth opportunity

Against this backdrop, Daplyn views FuturePrint Industrial Print in Munich as timely. The packaging narrative is well covered across the industry. But industrial applications - decor, automotive, functional, direct-to-shape, metal - remain under-penetrated relative to their potential.

What makes the event format relevant is the exhibitor mix. It is not simply a hall of off-the-shelf printers. It is a concentration of collaborators: integrators, software and electronics specialists, ink suppliers, and enabling technologies. Exactly the ecosystem you need if you are not buying a “printer”, but building a capability into an existing production line.

That matters because many manufacturers do not want an offline print operation that disrupts workflow. They want in-line, in-situ, bespoke integration. They want a solution that fits their line, their substrates, and their economics.

2026: a year of expansion - and a test of maturity

Daplyn’s closing outlook is optimistic: direct-to-shape, metal decoration, flexible packaging, and new industrial markets are poised for growth. The technology is ready. The ecosystem is stronger. The doubts that used to haunt inkjet - speed, cost, colour, viability beyond short runs - are increasingly being put to bed.

The next phase is not about proving inkjet is possible. It is about proving it is valuable.

And that, in industrial markets, is always decided on the factory floor.