Tech-Knowledge

The wide-format industry isn’t known for printing to environmentally friendly media, but there are now a number of more sustainable substrates around.

There's a lot of talk about environmentally friendly printing, but not so much in the wide-format sector because of the nature of the substrates typically in use. However, it's striking that many of the newer materials coming to market are being hailed as more sustainable offerings for this arena.

With the main trade shows of 2012 done and dusted it’s time to assess the technological trends they highlighted in the wide-format arena.

So, we’re midway through the year and we’ve had three big exhibitions - Fespa Digital, Sign and Digital, and Drupa - with all their attendant announcements and product launches, but have we seen anything that's really new in terms of technology for the large-format display graphics sector? Rather than simply list the various announcements, which we’ve already covered through the previews and the news pages, here we’ll look at the bigger themes and trends highlighted by the events.

Nessan Cleary reports on the technical trends and developments related to superwide inkjet printers.

There’s wide-format and then there’s superwide - but it can be hard to define exactly what a superwide printer should be. Obviously these are going to be wider printers, but how wide? 

Things are happening that will push through the barriers wide-format has with VDP adoption. Nessan Cleary explains.

Variable data is one of the great promises of digital printing, making it possible to vary parts of a job across a complete run. We’ve all seen examples of variable data printing because it’s a core technology in transactional printing on things like our bank statements.