Dec 12, 2001 - If you stand in front of it, it takes your breath away! Stretching from one end of the historic old Town Hall building to the other and reaching from street level to the very top, a giant advent calendar dominates Birmingham’s Victoria Square. Printed with a classic Father Christmas scene and sponsored by Coca-Cola, it measures a staggering 54 meters wide and 18 meters tall. What you would be looking at is the world’s biggest advent calendar. And that’s official, according to Guinness Book of Records who were on hand to verify the measurements. But what you wouldn’t know was that it was all printed on a Scitex Grandjet S5 by Cambridge-based Macro Art, one of Europe’s largest super-wide format print specialists. Recently acquired by Macro Art Vision Ltd, the Scitex Grandjet S5 is, in itself, unique in offering seamless print runs up to five meters wide in record time. Two days and counting! Macro Art was under pressure to produce this festive display in less than two days. That’s approximately 46 hours to print countless five meter-wide strips and weld them together to create the finished piece. Domingo Nieves, President of Scitex Vision Europe is, naturally, exceedingly proud of the achievement: “We had worked very closely with Macro Art since the Scitex Grandjet S was installed earlier this year and are pleased at their success in fulfilling this historic project on it. With its enhanced speed capability, exceptional colour gamut and outstanding optical density, the Scitex Grandjet S5 is the right machine to achieve the results in the time available. It is a standing testament to the expertise and commitment of the team at Macro Art and the capability of our machine.” And justifiably so. The project was big for all the participants by any measure. It began when Macro Art Director, John Walker, approached German-based Blow UP Media, Europe’s largest ‘huge outdoor media’ company with operations in practically every European country, including the UK. At the time, Blow UP Media were looking for a printer in the UK capable of handling this massive project. John Walker quickly realized that his company would have to increase its print capability if they were to take on a project of this size and handle its growing workload of general business. “We knew we needed a fifth super-wide format printer to add to our existing line-up of super-wide machines and Scitex Grandjet S was the natural solution,” Walker claimed. “Scitex Vision had been talking to us for some time, so we asked them for a demonstration of the Scitex Grandjet S5. It passed our colour-matching tests and delivered on its promise of high volume, high speed output, so we installed it. The advantage of the Scitex Grandjet S5 for us is its phenomenal print speed allied to its five meter wide print capability. It is 36% faster than our existing equipment so, once rolling, could slash print times dramatically to meet the tight deadlines.”