REAL ONE METER PER SEC PARALLEL PRINTING SPEED

Digital Printing of Billboards

Besides TV, billboards are one of the most effective advertiing media. The past few decades have seen striking improvements in this area of outdoor advertising. Statistics suggest that there are over ten million billboards worldwide. The advertisements are replaced at regular intervals of 10-30 days which could mean up to 150-200 million billboards a year.

Taking the total cost of an ordinary billboard into consideration, advertisers spend at least $4.5-6 billion on multiplication . Since there is a cut-throat competition in the billboard market only a small profit margin is attainable owing to the high costs of raw-materials and equipment etc.

There is a great demand for relatively low volumes so output prices include a high proportion of materials and labor costs. It is unlikely that the overall costs of billboards will decrease considerably if the conventional technologies are used. New multiplication techniques are no real alternatives to the market dominance of the offset method.

Only partial solutions have been found to the above-mentioned problem because the digital printing systems have not been applied for printing high volumes. This is mainly due to the fact that large format images need the quick motion of big quantities of ink. Only a few technologies e.g. Xerographic are capable of applying and carrying such ink quantities.

However, the elaborateness of the equipment in use and the high cost of the special materials result in prices which are difficult for the market to accept. On top of all these the resistance of the final product to the harsh weather conditions can only be improved by costly supplementary work..