The European Digital Press Association announced its 30 category winners during FESPA Global Print Expo 2026
The European Digital Press (EDP) Association announced the winners of its 2026 awards cycle during a presentation at the FESPA Global Print Expo in Barcelona, which took place from 19 to 22 May. The 2026 edition honoured 30 distinct products and solutions across the large-format, commercial print, packaging, software, and finishing categories, providing a definitive overview of current technical advancements across the European graphic arts value chain.
The primary operational trend defining this year’s winning cohort was the transition from isolated, machine-specific efficiency to intelligent automation. The independent EDP judging panel noted a substantial rise in software and hardware architectures that actively deploy artificial intelligence to interpret active production data, guide machinery operators, and construct more resilient, adaptive workflows from pre-press through to mechanical finishing.
The awards also highlighted steady improvements in the baseline economics of digital printing. Whilst complete performance and cost parity with conventional analogue methods remains segment-dependent, the technical evaluation confirmed that the operational gap is narrowing. The judges emphasised that a strategic coexistence of digital and analogue systems on the production floor makes strong commercial sense, allowing print service providers to utilise digital presses for shorter runs, custom versioning, reduced material waste, and rapid turnarounds whilst maintaining analogue assets for high-volume jobs.
A major highlight of the ceremony was the presentation of the EDP Industry Achievement Award, which was won by the Open Software Initiative led by Durst Group. The accolade recognises the group’s contribution towards establishing a more connected, interoperable print environment. Developed as an API-based ecosystem rather than an open-source movement, the initiative creates a standardised communication framework that enables hardware, front-end software, and downstream finishing tools from competing manufacturers to interact freely, mirroring the operational impact that the universal PDF standard brought to document sharing.
By moving beyond proprietary data structures, the modular initiative provides print service providers, third-party system integrators, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with a neutral framework to streamline data transmission. This cooperative engineering strategy marks a broader industry pivot, transforming isolated print rooms into unified, data-driven production environments that support automated data tracking, enhanced setup flexibility, and higher shift-level productivity.
Michael Seidl, Vice President of the EDP Association, said, “The 2026 EDP Awards edition shows that the industry is truly committed to digital, it is building its future on it. Automation is becoming intelligent, AI is becoming usable, and the economics are following. This is where transformation turns into real competitiveness.”