EDP Awards 2026 Celebrates New Era of Digital Print
Digital transformation in the print and packaging sectors continues to accelerate and mature, a trend underscored at the EDP Awards 2026 held on 20 May. Convened alongside the recently concluded FESPA Global Print Expo in Barcelona, the annual awards spotlighted an industry rapidly shifting toward smarter, highly integrated digital workflows.
This year, 30 winners across all EDP categories showcased the breadth of innovation shaping the industry today—from large format, commercial print and packaging to software, workflow, and finishing.
Across these winners, one trend stands out. Automation is no longer just about efficiency, but is evolving into intelligent automation, increasingly driven by AI, capable of interpreting data, guiding operators, and making production workflows more adaptive and resilient. From prepress to production and finishing, solutions are moving beyond isolated tasks to connected, data-driven ecosystems.
At the same time, the economics of digital printing continue to improve. While not all segments have reached full parity with conventional processes, the gap is closing—especially when looking at the entire production floor, where digital and analogue coexistence makes strong economic sense. Reduced waste, faster turnaround times, greater flexibility, and the ability to handle shorter runs and versioning are making digital solutions more viable across a growing number of applications.
What distinguishes this year’s winners is not just innovation for its own sake, but practical relevance. The awarded solutions demonstrate how technology can be applied to real production challenges, by simplifying workflows, increasing uptime, enabling new applications, and supporting more sustainable operations.
This year, the EDP Awards also recognised the Industry Achievement Award presented to the Open Software Initiative, led by Durst Group, in recognition of its contribution to a more connected and interoperable print industry. The award was collected by Christian Harder, Chief Sales Officer at Durst Group.
At a time when production environments are increasingly complex, the initiative introduces an API-based approach that enables communication between machines, software, and workflows across vendors. It is not about open source, but about defining a new level of openness—a common language that allows systems to interact more freely, in a way that the PDF standard once did for documents. The platform is designed as a neutral and modular ecosystem, allowing print service providers (PSPs), integrators, and OEMs to streamline workflows without boundaries.
This initiative reflects a broader shift in the industry: from isolated solutions to integrated, data-driven production environments. By opening up its architecture beyond its own hardware, Durst is helping to establish a foundation for more automation, greater flexibility, and increased productivity across the print value chain.
“The 2026 EDP Awards edition shows that the industry is truly committed to digital—it is building its future on it,” says EDP Association Vice President Michael Seidl. “Automation is becoming intelligent, AI is becoming usable, and the economics are following. This is where transformation turns into real competitiveness.”
The EDP Awards, organised by the Austria-based European Digital Press (EDP) Association, is an annual competition that recognises the best digital technologies in various categories of digital printing, publishing, and converting.
For more information about the winners please visit https://edpawards.com/winners-2026/
