After Modex 2026: Thank You, and the Overlap Problem

The aisles at the Georgia World Congress Center have cleared, the booths are on their way back to warehouses across the country, and our team is back home going through stacks of business cards. Modex 2026 is in the books!

Thank you to the customers who met up on the floor with pictures of jammed printers and WMS dashboards they don't trust. Thank you to our vendor partners who brought the gear, the demos, and the engineers who answer a spec question on the spot. Thank you to MHI and John Paxton's team for filling all three halls of the GWCC for a second show in a row! And thank you to Atlanta, which remains one of the easier cities in the country to host 50,000 people who mostly want to talk about pallet flow!

Here is what stood out this year, and it is the thing we did not see on any slide: the functional overlap across the floor is bigger than it has ever been.

Walk the 4-inch industrial printer category alone and you can see SATO, Zebra, Honeywell, and TSC Printronix all running labels that would look identical coming off a receiving dock. Rugged Android handhelds from Zebra, Honeywell, and Bluebird will scan the same GS1-128 barcode, hit the same 6-foot drop spec, and run the same third-party MDM. WMS vendors - there were dozens - all promise the same top-line outcomes: higher accuracy, lower labor cost, faster throughput. That is good news for competition! It is a real problem for the person trying to buy.

When every printer at 203 dpi prints a readable barcode and every handheld runs Android 13 with a 2D imager, the spec sheet stops being useful. The decision gets made on the things spec sheets do not show: how the printer behaves after eight months of label dust in a non-climate-controlled building, how the handheld's scan window holds up after the third forklift incident, which WMS integrator still answers the phone in year three, how long the replacement printhead actually lasts once the ribbon is running at your line speed on your label stock. Those are not catalog questions. They are field questions, and the only way to answer them is to have lived with the hardware in production environments - across facilities, climates, label stocks, and duty cycles.

That is the work we have been doing for more than 30 years. It is what we were doing for the customers we met on the floor this week. Our job is not to sell the product with the most checkboxes. It is to match the printer, scanner, mobile computer, or print-and-apply system to the environment it actually has to live in - and then to back the decision with the service plan, spare parts, and printhead supply that keep it running long after the purchase order clears.

If you are sitting on a short list of three or four printers, handhelds, or software options that all look the same on paper, send us the list. We will tell you which one we would put in your facility and why - and we will tell you when the answer is "none of those, here's what actually fits."

See you at Modex 2028 back in Atlanta! Between now and then, we will be in your building!