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Vinyl cutters and laser cutters for signage

Vinyl cutters and laser cutters are normally used to create signage for things like buildings and vans. They can also be used for vehicle wrappings. An example of this can be the Sky vans which use vinyl cutters/laser cutters to create images and text on the side of the vans such as Sky Sports & TV shows like The Simpsons. In the early stages of vinyl cutters, they were required to have lots of different pieces of vinyl to get different colours onto the print. Although now the vinyl cutters have been developed so that only one piece of vinyl can be used for all different types of colours for the print. The image will need to either be a vector so it can be enlarged to any size without losing quality or it will have to be a bitmap with a very high resolution which will allow the image to keep its quality when printed out onto vinyl.

Inkjet & wide format printing for bitmap displays and posters

Inkjet & wide format printing is normally used for bitmap displays for things like posters, signs and billboards. This printing is ideal for outdoor areas as the printing is weather-proof and can print onto almost any surface including glass and plastic.

Laser printers for leaflets and flyers

Laser printers are normally used to produce leaflets and flyers as it is a fast process that can be simply done. The printing process is created by a laser beam projecting an image onto a page and an electrically charged rotating drum printing the image onto the page via direct contact and heat, which fuses the ink to the paper. Laser printers use dry ink which use the colours CMYK, which stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

3D Printing

3D Printing is normally used to produce three dimensional shapes from a digital model. The shapes are normally created via a computer aided design package or by a 3D scanner and the manual modelling process are similar to plastic arts such as sculpting. The file type which is compatible with a 3D printer is an STL file which is recognized as a 3D printable file format.