Large format printing, explained like a spec sheet. Banners, posters, wall and floor graphics, window vinyl and site signage. Priced by the square foot, specced in advance, proofed before it runs.
Everything about this work is knowable before you spend anything — the unit, the resolution, the material and the finishing. So here it all is in advance.
Any print too wide
for an office printer.
That's the whole of it. Large format printing is the category of printing that starts roughly where a desktop machine stops — around 18 inches wide — and runs up to whole building wraps. Different machine, different resolution logic, different pricing unit.
Product · roll-fed vinyl — unrolled, printed, hemmed, grommeted
Large format digital printing is the roll-fed side of the trade: banner material, photo paper, backlit film and adhesive vinyl printed edge to edge from a digital file, then finished with hems, grommets, lamination or mounting. "Digital" here just distinguishes it from screen printing — there is no plate and no minimum run, which is why a single banner costs a sane amount instead of a setup fee plus a banner.
Large format vinyl printing is the sub-family most businesses actually need: printable adhesive vinyl for windows, walls, floors and vehicles, laminated when it has to survive sun, scuffing or scrubbing. And large format poster printing is the fast lane — photo-quality output at trade sizes, mounted to a rigid board or left rolled.
Three things distinguish it from ordinary printing, and all three change how you should prepare a file:
- It's priced by area, not by page. Width × height ÷ 144 = square feet. Material rate × area = the bill. Halve a dimension and you roughly halve the cost.
- Resolution requirements go down as size goes up, because viewing distance goes up with it. A billboard is printed at resolutions that would look broken in your hand. See the prep guide.
- Finishing is most of the craft. A banner that hangs straight for three seasons and one that curls in a month are the same print with different hems.
Four jobs,
four different finishes.
The print is the easy part. What you do to it afterwards is what decides whether it survives a Phoenix summer.
| Job | Material | Finishing | Resolution at size | Turnaround |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Outdoor banner | 13oz scrim vinyl | Welded hem + grommets | 80–100 ppi | Quoted per job |
| Poster | Photo or matte paper | Rolled, or mounted to board | 150 ppi | Quoted per job |
| Window / wall vinyl | Adhesive vinyl | Laminated, contour cut | 100–150 ppi | Quoted per job |
| Floor graphic | Adhesive vinyl | Anti-slip laminate required | 100–150 ppi | Quoted per job |
| Rigid sign | Dibond · acrylic · foamcore | Mounted, drilled or standoffs | 100–150 ppi | Quoted per job |
| Site / construction | Corrugated or dibond | Stakes or frame fixings | 80–100 ppi | Quoted per job |
The edge is how you tell them apart.
Rigid work starts as a sheet of something, and in the hand you identify it by its edge. That's what the surface below draws.
Product · acrylic, aluminium, dibond, foamcore, vinyl — edges to relative scale
Foamcore is light and cheap and belongs indoors; it dents if you look at it wrong and it delaminates in damp. Dibond — two thin aluminium skins bonded to a solid core — is the outdoor workhorse: dead flat, stays flat, takes vinyl beautifully. Acrylic is what you want when light is part of the design, because a cut edge pipes it. Aluminium is the thin, tough, unglamorous choice for anything that gets knocked. And vinyl isn't a board at all — it's the film that goes onto one, or onto your window, wall or truck.
Width × height ÷ 144.
That's square feet per piece; multiply by quantity for the area your job buys. Every material has its own rate per square foot — banner is cheap, laminated cast vinyl is not — and finishing is usually priced separately because a hem costs the same whatever is printed on it.
Three ways to spend less without printing something worse: round down to a standard trade size rather than a custom one; ask whether the job needs lamination (outdoors and floors, yes; a two-week indoor banner, usually not); and check whether one larger piece beats several smaller ones, because area is continuous but setup is not.
Large format, answered.
Large format printing is any printing too wide for a standard office printer — in practice, work starting around 18 inches wide and running up to building-scale. It uses roll-fed or flatbed machines, is priced by the square foot rather than by the page, and needs lower image resolution than small print because the finished piece is viewed from further away.
Digital printing goes straight from your file to the material with no plate and no setup, so a single piece is economical and every piece can differ. Screen printing pushes ink through a prepared stencil, which costs more to set up but less per piece at high volumes and can lay down heavier, more opaque ink. For signage quantities, digital is almost always the right answer.
Roll width sets the seamless maximum, and anything wider is produced as panels that are joined on site — which is normal for wall murals and building wraps. We publish this shop's exact maximum width on this page once the machine spec is confirmed, rather than quoting a number we have not verified.
Build in CMYK if your software offers it, because that is what the press prints in and it lets you see roughly what you will get. If it does not — most web and office tools are RGB only — send RGB and we convert on a calibrated profile, which is far better than letting the printer guess at the last moment. Screen content is the exception: menu boards and digital signage stay RGB.
It depends on the material, whether it is laminated, and how much direct sun it takes — and Phoenix is a harsher test than most of the country. Unlaminated banner vinyl in full southern exposure fades noticeably faster than the same print in shade or laminated. We will publish the specific media and laminate we run, with their rated life, once that spec is confirmed.
Prep guide
Resolution by viewing distance, bleed, colour and formats.
Templates
Correctly sized dielines with bleed and hem zones drawn.
Vehicle & window
The same printer, applied to glass and body panels.
Custom signs
When the job wants metal, light or a permanent structure.