Premium Papers for Digital Presses: The Mohawk Digital Collection Expansion

Digital printing's substrate problem is quietly being solved. Mohawk, a major name in premium papers, has expanded its Digital Collection with a broader range of sheets optimized for sheetfed inkjet technology, the result of collaboration and testing with HP Indigo, Canon, and Konica Minolta. The move reflects a wider industry shift: as digital presses handle more commercial, packaging, and book printing work, paper mills are engineering substrates specifically for inkjet's chemistry, not adapting older grades and hoping for the best.

Why Inkjet Needs Its Own Papers

Inkjet presses jet water-based inks onto the sheet, and the paper's surface chemistry decides how those inks behave. A paper made for toner or offset can show ink bleed, mottling, or slow drying on an inkjet press. Papers developed for digital production control absorption, hold dot shape, and dry fast enough for inline finishing. The new Mohawk grades span established lines like Superfine, Options, Via, Renewal, Loop, Mosaic, and Everyday Digital, available across colors, finishes, and weights, and, notably, including grades engineered for digital packaging.

One Machine, Two Processes: Combined Hot Foil and Die-Cutting Reshapes Folding Carton Finishing

The finishing department has long been the bottleneck of folding carton production. Die-cutting and hot foil stamping typically run as separate passes, each with its own make-ready, its own registration setup, and its own queue of waiting jobs. A new generation of integrated finishing machinery is challenging that assumption — most visibly in the further development of the MK Duopress Power, a system that combines both processes in a single machine.

What the Machine Does

The MK Duopress Power arranges two die-cutting units in series. The first can run hot foil stamping while the second handles die-cutting only — or both stations can be dedicated to either process, opening up unusually creative packaging constructions. Individual panels are separated and die-cut from the sheet in the same pass that applies the metallic decoration. Heidelberg, which partners with MK Masterwork on folding carton finishing, reports the system reaches up to 7,000 sheets per hour depending on substrate, with a refined gripper structure holding register accuracy at full speed.

Inkjet's Corrugated Moment: When Digital Becomes the Default for Boxes

Corrugated board has long been the last analogue stronghold of packaging printing. Flexo presses running kilometer-long rolls have defined the economics of brown boxes for decades. That assumption is now under active revision, as a fresh round of industry analysis asks a pointed question: is flexo's share of corrugated output shrinking the way it did in shrink sleeves?

The Equipment Wave

The hardware story is unmistakable. EFI's Nozomi single-pass platform has been running production corrugated jobs for years, and HP has pushed its PageWide C550 single-pass post-print press as a cost-optimization tool for converters. Canon has announced the corrPRESS iB17, an inkjet press slated for 2027 that reproduces offset-like quality onto corrugated board at up to 8,111 square feet per hour, using water-based inks and a primer designed for indirect food contact. Agfa is supplying inkjet engines for BHS corrugated machinery, embedding digital heads directly into the OEM's line architecture.

Packaging Print Passes Half a Trillion: The $604bn Growth Forecast for 2029

Packaging and labels have become the strategic center of gravity for the printing industry. New market modelling from Smithers shows the sector generated $504.9 billion in global value in 2024 — more than half a trillion dollars — and forecasts growth to $604.0 billion by 2029, a 3.6 percent compound annual growth rate.

The Scale of the Numbers

The volume behind those figures is difficult to visualize: 14.31 trillion A4 print equivalents of labels, corrugated board, folding cartons, flexible paper and plastics, rigid plastic, and metal packaging were printed in 2024, consuming 1.54 million tons of ink. Output is projected to reach 17.12 trillion A4 equivalents by the end of the forecast period. While traditional publication and graphics markets remain static or decline, rising consumption of packaged goods continues to fuel expansion.

From Offset Presses to Printed Electronics: Komori's Industrial Pivot

Printing's largest equipment makers are quietly becoming technology conglomerates. Komori's first-quarter results for fiscal 2027 show why: revenue of 23.1 billion yen, up 2.5 percent year on year, operating income of 537 million yen, and orders of 33.2 billion yen above internal forecasts. Sheetfed offset press orders rose 46 percent, and international markets now contribute more than 70 percent of revenue, with Europe up 41 percent and Greater China up 74 percent. The traditional press business is not shrinking — but it is no longer the whole story.

Four Divisions, One Technology Core

Komori's operations now span four divisions built on the same imaging and transport know-how. Offset printing remains the anchor, serving commercial, publishing, and packaging printers. Security printing supplies presses for banknotes, passports, and secure documents to more than thirty countries. Digital printing systems target variable-data, short-run, and personalized work. The fourth division — printed electronics — is where the growth narrative lives.

The Connected Book Factory: End-to-End Automation Reshapes Book Manufacturing

Book manufacturing has historically been a chain of handoffs: order entry, prepress, printing, cover production, binding, inspection, packing. In 2026 the industry's focus has shifted from individual machines to the connections between them. Digital book production automation now means reducing friction across the entire pipeline — order intake, imposition, printing, cover preparation, casing-in, inspection, and dispatch — so a job moves through the plant like one continuous operation rather than seven separate ones.

Prepress That Gets Out of the Way

The first bottleneck to fall is prepress. Automated imposition software now handles pagination, creep compensation, and spine adjustments without operator intervention, while cover preparation is templated and versioned automatically. Files flow straight to press from the order system — essential as orders shrink. When setup time approaches zero, the cost penalty for short runs disappears, and the choice between offset and digital shifts from quantity to turnaround.

Books as Objects: Collectible Editions Become Publishing's Fastest-Growing Format

Publishing's quiet growth story of 2026 is not the ebook — it is the book as a physical object worth owning. Premium print-on-demand editions with printed edges, foil stamping, and packaging that feels like a product launch are multiplying, and the numbers explain why: the global print-on-demand market is projected to climb from roughly USD 12.96 billion in 2026 to more than USD 100 billion by 2034.

Printed Edges and Foil Are the New Normal

The fastest-rising details in collectible editions are the ones visible from across a room: painted or printed page edges, foil-blocked covers, and textured cloth cases. Digital finishing has made these effects feasible on short runs — a few hundred copies of a special edition can carry embellishment that once required a full offset run to justify. For authors and small presses, the result is a premium product without premium minimums.