Blurred Lines at the SGIA Expo

What exactly is “commercial printing”? For decades — at least — that was a more or less easy-to-answer question: brochures, business cards, flyers, perhaps even some posters. Until quite recently, commercial printing was considered separate from wide-format printing, which was the purview of sign shops as well as other businesses that specialized in display graphics. Sometimes these were also commercial printers, but more often than not small- and wide-format shops were separate entities. If commercial printers had any wide-format equipment, it was almost entirely for proofing.

But one of the themes of this week’s Expo — as has been the case for the past couple of years — is that the line separating these entities has been blurring. It should be no surprise what is the blurring force: digital printing. Improved ease-of-use and greater affordability of digital wide-format equipment has opened up new and relatively high-margin applications to general commercial shops that have been seeing margins on their traditional bread-and-butter work on the decline — if that work even exists anymore thanks to electronic, non-print media.

Hardware and software manufacturers and developers have also noticed this trend, and many are tailoring their portfolios and surrounding support ecosystems to help commercial printers take advantage of wide-format and other kinds of specialty printing.

And not just printing. Dynamic digital signage (DDS) is becoming a fast-growing application, and while no one seriously believes that printed or other physical signage is going to be displaced or replaced by digital signage, DDS is an increasingly important complement to traditional signage or other display graphics.

One company bringing together a variety of print and non-print applications is Roland DGA (Booth 601), whose printers and complementary machines are designed to help commercial printers make the transition to wide format. Earlier this year, the company launched three new entries in its CAMM-1 line of vinyl cutters: the GR-640, 540 and 420, which Roland is demonstrating in its booth. While a lot of printers have built-in cutters that perform basic cuts, often a shop will need a separate cutting unit not only to improve productivity (cutting offline can be more efficient than cutting inline with the printing), but also to add different types of cutting and related processes. So the new CAMM-1 cutters feature a dual-position tool carriage that eases the transition from kiss-cutting to perforating, and other new improvements include faster speed, the ability to cut through thicker materials and the ability to read crop marks generated by popular industry software, which lets the cutters to be paired with many existing wide-format printers, not just Roland units.

For the past several years, Roland has been experimenting with different options for helping print service providers — as well as sign professionals — create digital signage. More recently, it has changed its focus slightly to helping PSPs create content for digital signage. At last year’s Expo, Roland was demonstrating a beta version of its content generation software, and earlier this year the InClix Creative Media Maker was officially launched. InClix is a cloud-based tool for that offers an integrated design and workflow management system, as well as quick access to design templates, royalty-free stock images and rich media. InClix also offers a community environment, where users can even create and sell their own content or templates to other InClix community members.

The lines between virtually any kind of printing — or any kind of display graphics, printed or not — are becoming less and less distinct. If we hear Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” playing at some point, it would be appropriate.