Sign UK will be hoping for a flood of visitors when it opens the doors to Hall 2 at the NEC on Tuesday. Pre registrations for the show are running above the rates of any previous iteration of the event says the organiser.
The three-day show returned after a pandemic induced hiatus last year, but attendance suffered a hangover from the lockdown period and the nervousness that prevailed at the time. This time, with no such restriction, organiser Faversham House hopes to tap into a desire to see machines that have been introduced over the last couple of years, especially at the lower end of the display print market.
Thus the latest Mimaki 330 printers will make their debut in the UK on the Hybrid Services stand, as a standard solvent model, a dye sub version and as a print and cut machine. The stand will also attract attention for the direct to film TXF150-75 for garment printing without some of the restriction in material that apply to dye sublimation printing.
Direct to film technology attracted a good deal of attention at the recent Printer and Promotion show at the NEC and this is expected to carry over to Sign UK especially for those printers aiming to expand into either promotional items or garment printing or both. Direct to film also offers advantages over UV printing for promotional items.
For the die hard display printers there will also be the revamped Roland DG range to view, Epson printers and the Soyang/Josero stand machines from Fujifilm and InkTec. SwissQPrint will feature the most sophisticated flatbed printer at the show. At the other end of the scale, Morgana will bring the FC6000 digital cutter to a UK event for the first time. This is aimed more at the small format digital printer than display printers, who will be served by Vivid Laminating and by Trotec’s laser cutters among others. Soyang’s materials will be joined by the portfolio from Premier Paper which has been growing into this market.
The exhibits will be matched by a series of seminars through the three days. Those on the first day have a sustainability theme, including discussion panels. The second day has a focus on the sign sector and the third day has sessions on recruitment and the skills issue.
However, the background to the show and the industry has proved a barrier to some of the companies that the organiser would have liked to attend. There is no stand for major dealers like CMYUK or Ultragraph. This should not deter the on profile visitors, nor those that want to keep track of developments in a sector that they might consider for a diversification.
