Moving with the times – the Future of Industrial Inkjet

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Moving with the times – the Future of Industrial Inkjet

By Ken Stack, Executive Chairman, Engineered Printing Solutions

Industrial inkjet has matured quickly, and nowhere was that more evident than walking the floor and talking to customers at Printing United 2025. What stood out this year wasn’t faster, wider equipment, it was the unmistakable shift toward production-grade direct-to-object (DTO) inkjet and the automation required to support it. The industry is clearly moving into its next phase, where the future belongs to manufacturers that pair high-performance single-pass printing with high-performance automated workflows.

For years, DTO was synonymous with scanning inkjet systems. They are flexible, relatively easy to operate, and have been the default solution for short-run and mid-volume customization. But for customers scanning systems come with inherent limitations: each machine typically requires a dedicated operator, and while they excel at agility, they do not deliver true production throughput. As brands introduce more SKUs, seasonal variations and on-demand customization, many customers now find themselves running fleets of slower scanning systems to keep up—adding labor, compounding complexity and increasing the risk of bottlenecks.

That dynamic is changing fast. Single-pass inkjet has reached a new level of reliability, consistency and throw-distance performance, making it practical for high-volume DTO manufacturing. Customers who once managed multiple scanning units are now asking a new question: How do we consolidate volume, reduce labor requirements, and drive real production efficiencies? Single-pass provides the answer. It lets manufacturers migrate high-volume SKUs onto one high-throughput line capable of decorating thousands of objects per hour.

But that shift also exposes a new reality. The bottleneck in DTO is no longer the print engine, it’s everything around it. A single-pass system can print faster than any human can load, unload, orient or transfer parts. While scanning systems give operators time to manually handle parts between cycles, single-pass removes that margin entirely. Human operators simply cannot feed parts fast enough or consistently enough to keep pace with modern digital throughput. To unlock the full economic advantage of production DTO, automation becomes essential.

And that is exactly what I noticed throughout the show floor this year. More manufacturers, integrators and print providers were asking the same question: How do we design end-to-end workflows that can keep up with the printer? Conveyance systems, robotic handling, intelligent orientation, automated inspection and adaptive fixturing are rapidly becoming the critical enablers of production inkjet. The printhead technology has already made its leap, now the rest of the manufacturing environment must evolve with it.

At EPS, we’re already seeing this firsthand. Our introduction of motion-controlled and robotic printing concepts generated strong interest not because of the robot itself, but because it signals where the industry is heading. As single-pass DTO accelerates, flexible automation will be the key to bringing digital print to more shapes, more materials, and more production workflows. Ultimately, the promise of single-pass is not just speed, it’s the ability to deliver consistent, labor-efficient, high-volume output with minimal operator intervention.

Industrial inkjet is no longer just a tool for decoration; it is becoming a core manufacturing technology. The next wave of innovation will focus on integrating digital print seamlessly into production lines, reducing labor dependency and enabling manufacturers to scale without scaling headcount. And over the coming months, we’ll have more to share about new automation solutions designed specifically to keep pace with high-speed DTO—solutions that will help manufacturers fully realize the economic and operational advantages of single-pass inkjet.

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