SOLUTIONS

In digital printing, signage includes promotional, graphical and photographic solutions like posters, boards, windows graphics, wallpapers, pop-ups, roll-ups, backlits and soft signage.

Signage is the largest market sector for inkjet, representing 57% of the value in 2011. But this proportion is steadily falling as the technology is taken up to print books, transactional and direct mail, packaging and labels, and commercial products, which are all growing strongly.

Signage was the first market to use inkjet following the launch of the first wide-format presses in the 1990s. It was competitive against screen printing and inkjet has replaced much screen capacity for signage with the sector targeted by many commercial printers.

The equipment used ranges from low-cost traversing head machines to 5m-plus grand-format printers and high capacity flatbed machines where the bed moves under a fixed array of inkjet heads to build up the image with quality determined by the number of passes.

Inkjet is well established in signage and point-of-sale using wide-format equipment, but the really dynamic sector is in high-speed inkjet, with many print providers moving away from high-volume mono laser printing.

The wide and grand-format graphics sector is a very broad sector of signage printing which can cover items such as printing exhibition graphics, posters, post of purchase advertisements, bill boards and building wraps. This market segment was the earliest to be revolutionized by the first generation of inkjet print heads to come onto the market. The ability to have more replica uhren customized posters, billboards etc. in a short time and at a lower cost has driven the on-demand business model to revolutionize the world of display graphics and has resulted in a large number of wide and super-wide (or grand) format printers being available on the market today.

The global printed point-of-sale (POS) and signage market amounted to US$ 60 billion in 2017 with 0.8 percent annual growth to 2020 with indoor signage growing year-on-year by 1.2 percent. The future of signage in an electronic world to 2020 identifies five core factors influencing signage industry trends across the rest of the decade: the nature of point-of-purchase (POP) suppliers, compliance, the effect of print management, globalization, and the evolution of signage in the wider context of advertising.

Digital platforms, like display screens, are becoming one of the most powerful sources of display and advertising. It has been predicted that worldwide, revenue for digital signage equipment, software, services, and media is growing at around five percent per annum and hits US$17 Billion by 2017.