The last five years have seen a substantial investment in UV flatbed printers on the part of display graphics and signage producers. And many have also found that a perfect ancillary piece of equipment is a cutting table. Time was, if you needed to, say, contour cut something, sign shop production staff would be hunched over worktables cutting printed boards with X-Acto knives—not the most productive workflow in the world. Shops that have added a table—with various levels of automation and swappable tooling—have found that the kinds of jobs and applications they can produce, and produce efficiently, has increased inordinately.

An automated cutting table can also help with the perennial challenge of employee shortages—when you have a limited staff and a lot of work, surely employees have better things to do than manually cut shapes out of boards.

As a result, the past few years have seen a spate of new entrants into the cutting market, and veteran players releasing new platforms that boast a host of new features.