(Be sure to register for Thursday’s Technology Outlook week session on wide format & signage and textiles & apparel presented by Richard Romano and Cary Sherburne.)

General trends in wide format and signage since our last Technology Outlook Week have been almost exclusively COVID and safety signage-related. They include:

As for recent new technologies and product announcements, late 2020 and early 2021 may have been a little slow compared to some previous years, but that could just indicate a relative maturity of the wide-format equipment market. As we have been seeing, even pre-pandemic, there have not been too many major technological innovations in the wide-format equipment sphere. Major introductions have predominantly focused on filling in gaps in vendor portfolios. Flatbed printers have seen some tweaks to things like board feeding and vacuum tables, the goal being to complement improvements in print speed with faster on- and off-boarding. Across the board, speed improvements are top improvements.