A few years ago I was contacted by a manufacturer that clearly hadn't done much homework on the subject of material widths, and wished to use my consultancy services. This particular company wanted to introduce to the market a new roll-fed media which was 8m in width but it didn't take rocket science to explain why, in reality, this wasn't a particularly practical idea.

Plenty of present-day jobs are, indeed, wider than the maximum of 5m that we can produce, helped along by welding and other joining capabilities. On roll-fed superwide-format printers, this dimension is augmented by the fact that the application is only limited in length by the software being used to generate the file and by the amount of material on the roll.

Practicalities and logistics are two of the factors which make 5m a sensible maximum width

It might be a nice idea to print to wider sizes but, like my potential client, it's worth taking a few minutes to work through the practicalities of greater widths and their handling. As such, it doesn't really take much common sense to establish that, although this sounds like a good idea, in realistic terms it probably isn't going to work.

Although there is one specialist display producer who has developed his own extra-superwide-format ink-jet printer, manufacturers have not followed this example and have stuck to 5m as being their maximum practical width. Even in this market sector there are fewer machines out there in daily use than their narrower roll-to-roll counterparts. Their appeal is growing as there is now far higher quality in today's engines than in those of yesteryear and, with multi-roll capability, these systems are now offering good levels of flexibility.

As such, 5m as a maximum width is practical. Any wider and a whole load of issues need to be factored in. Apart from the physical dimensions of the machine itself, coating plants would need to produce new lines to handle the media, and there is the storage of the material to consider. Even present day maximum widths aren't the easiest to handle, load and unload, and display producers need to have sizeable floor space to work with output, plus the ability to install it. And the logistics of delivery are pretty mind-boggling, too.

Yes, there are users wanting to produce greater widths for specialist applications, such as building and scaffold wraps but, for these people, there is finishing equipment that can be used to join pre-printed pieces prior to installation. So, while the idea might be appealing at first glance, in practical terms anything wider than 5m is unlikely to become a standard size for the time being.