Digital printing technology, originally developed for office and data processing applications, has moved beyond those in the past decade and is now finding use in virtually every field of printing, and even beyond printing in the usual sense.Inkjet printing is leading the way into new application areas. In the past, inkjet printing has been used in product marking, carton marking, addressing, and large format printing and plotting, as well as office and home printing. Today, inkjet technology is being applied in textile printing, the printing of packaging (beyond marking and addressing), postal franking, commercial photo processing, the printing of decorative materials, and even “printing” of threedimensional objects. Tomorrow, we will see inkjet technology applied in even more esoteric fields, such as the printing of microcircuits and flat-panel displays, and in some areas that cannot be called printing at all.
Carl Thomas Ashley, "Emerging Applications for Inkjet Technology" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies (NIP18), 2002, pp 540 - 542, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2002.18.1.art00027_2