In this day and age, no self-respecting wide format and signage shop can be without a cutter—and while for many that means primarily a rollfed X-Y cutter for paper, vinyl, or other soft materials, companies that have started printing on rigid materials have found that investing in a cutting table has improved their productivity and expanded the number of applications they can produce. The alternative has traditionally been to have a skilled employee hunched over a work table manually cutting out shapes with an X-Acto knife. That’s not the most productive workflow in the world—and finding such employees has been increasingly challenging—so if you have the volume (and the space) to support it a cutting table is the way to go.

Cutting tables are pretty basic, so there’s not a lot that really changes from generation to generation, aside from things like speed and various kinds of automation—either software-based or hardware-based, involving conveyor systems or robotic arms that load and/or offload printed boards. A lot of the table action is in the tooling, the hundreds of swappable tools that a table can support that offer a great deal of flexibility in what and how you can cut. It’s not just knives; tables also support routers which “rout” or bore out board, plastic, wood, or other thick material, and there are tools for tables that can mill, perforate, crease, engrave, and even create Braille lettering. Some tables can also automatically swap out the tooling, based on the parameters specified in the cut file.

Zünd has long offered a robotic arm option for its S3 series cutting table.