For the office imaging/output industry, the combined AIIM/OnDemand exhibition is essentially the one remaining industry show.

The show joins together the AIIM crowd (document scanning and management) with the OnDemand enthusiasts (high-speed digital printing). Sort of lost in the middle are providers of middle-of-the road office equipment (printers and copiers), which have a limited presence at this show, though they currently have no other dedicated industry-wide forum.

The show moved back to Philadelphia this year after two years in Boston, and the exhibitors I talked to were pleased that attendance was up, in spite of the recession. The exhibition management claimed 20,000 attendees, though I found that while there were crowds around some big players (Canon and Xerox most notably), they thinned out in other parts of the hall, especially after the first day.

For vendors, going to these shows is an expensive proposition. First there is the space rental fees and the set-up fees (don’t you dare plug in any machine without a union electrician!), but there are also the costs of trucking in booths and machines, transporting, housing, and feeding scores of key employees, and so on. During a recession when even willing buyers are stretching out the acquisition cycle, that’s a major expenditure.

So there were notable absences from the floor of companies that didn’t see a realistic chance of a return. Kodak was the biggest surprise – it is a leading maker of both document scanners and high-speed digital printers. Ricoh was not there (though its joint venture InfoPrint was). Copier companies like Kyocera, Sharp, and Toshiba had no booth. Unsurprisingly, printer companies like Lexmark, OKI, and Samsung weren’t there either.

The show was chaotic and exhausting, given the decibels produced by an array of noisy bindery equipment added to the general hubbub and the miked product barkers. For me, among all the overload, there were two major trends, at the top and the bottom of the scale, one from OnDemand and one from AIIM.

At the top in terms of coast and power, were a number of new color toner-based digital presses. Xerox showed off its impressive new DocuColor 242/252/262 light production machines and its 700 Digital Color Press, new and solid entrants in light production. Canon’s new imagePRESS 1100 series (models ranging from 110 to 135ppm) showed a remarkable range of front-end workflow and finishing options. InfoPrint’s new C900 machine (90ppm) and Konica Minolta’s bizhub PRO 950 (95ppm) are strong and versatile light to medium production systems. The range of options and the increasing sophistication of the options grows, as digital printing keeps biting into the margins of the still-immense offset printing market.

On the AIIM side, the biggest move I saw was in compact, competent, networked desktop scanners. OCR software vendor ABBYY showed off a remarkable application on the little Fujitsu fi-6010N iScanner. This app, called TouchTo, allows an operator to scan a document, have it pop up on the scanner’s LCD touchscreen, and simply touch the screen to identify keywords for document tagging and indexing – a task that otherwise would take tedious and error-prone typing. Thus, for a set of invoices of different formats, an operator could identify the invoice number, the total owed, the name of the company, and other critical fields. Canon, HP, and (off the show floor) Kodak showed new network models that look like they are headed in similar directions. The biggest issue in content scanning is not the speed or accuracy of the scan, but the usability of the digital document afterwards-we see big movement in this area.

These are bad times for the industry – but the research and development effort is making some real strides and there are some great upgrades for those who have the cash to spend.

Tags: ABBY, AIIM, Canon, OnDemand, Xerox