For much of the past 15 years, there has been a marked distinction between rollfed (aka roll-to-roll) and flatbed wide-format printers. In general, the distinction between them was, quite obviously, one ran flexible materials from rolls and one ran rigid “boards.” And, generally, those were the only distinctions you had to bear in mind, aside from the usual specs like speed, number of colors, size, and cost. (There are also sheetfed wide-format printers such as some of the single-pass machines like Memjet or HP PageWide devices, but they are another topic for another time.)

Here’s my usual semantic caution: in some sense “rollfed” and “roll-to-roll” refer to two different things—a rollfed printer could have a cutting mechanism and thus te printed substrate doesn’t refurl back onto another roll, for example—for all practical purposes, the two terms are synonymous and can be used interchangeably, although I do cite one exception below.

Today’s situation has become a bit more complex, if only because in the past couple of years dye-sublimation has become a more popular and prominent ink technology. So where the earliest roll-to-roll machines were predominantly solvent and eco-solvent machines, followed shortly thereafter by latex. Once UV came into the picture, and flatbeds proliferated, the “hybrid” wide-format printer emerged, which could do double-duty as a flatbed or a rollfed. For the first couple of generations, hybrid printers could often be considered “jack of both trades, master of neither,” but that situation has largely changed, and today’s hybrids can produce just as a high a quality as a dedicated flatbed or rollfed printer.