Besides the well known small inkjet printers for home and office, there is a market for professional inkjet printers; some being for page-width format printing, and most being for wide format printing. “Page-width format” means that the print width ranges from about 8.5″ to 37″ (about 20 cm to 100 cm). “Wide format” means that these are printers ranging in print width from 24″ up to 15′ (about 75 cm to 5 m). The application of the page-width printers is for printing high-volume business communications that have a lesser need for flashy layout and color. Particularly with the addition of variable data technologies, the page-width printers are important in billing, tagging, and individualized catalogs and newspapers. The application of most of the wide format printers is for printing advertising graphics; a minor application is printing of designs by architects or engineers.

Another specialty application for inkjets is producing prepress color proofs for printing jobs created in the digital realm. Such printers are designed to give accurate color rendition of how the final image will look (a “proof”) when the job is finally produced on a large volume press such as a four offset lithography press. A well-known example of an inkjet designed for proof work is an Iris printer, and outputs from them are commonly “iris proofs” or just “irises“.

In terms of units, the major supplier is Hewlett-Packard, which supply over 90 percent of the market for printers for printing technical drawings. The major products in their DesignJet series are the DesignJet 500/800, the DesignJet 1050 and the DesignJet 4000/4500. Besides this they also have the HP Designjet 5500, a six-color printer that is used especially for printing graphics. The constantly growing niche of page-format printing has been filled by Kodak, with the Kodak Versamark(tm) VJ1000, VT3000, and VX5000 printing systems. Scitex also made a short-lived entry into high-speed, variable-data, inkjet printing, but sold its profitable assets associated with the technology to Kodak in 2005.

A few other suppliers of low volume wide format printers are Epson, Kodak and Canon. Epson has a group of 3 Japanese companies around it that all use predominantly heads and inks coming from Epson: Mimaki, Roland and Mutoh.

More professional high-volume inkjet printers are made by a range of companies. These printers can range in price from 25,000€ to as high as 1.5 million €. Carriage widths on these units can range from 54″ to 192″ (about 1.4 to 5 m) and ink technologies tend toward solvent, eco-solvent and UV-curing as opposed to water-based (aqueous) ink sets. Major applications where these printers are used are for outdoor settings for billboards, truck sides and truck curtains, building graphics and banners, while indoor displays include point-of-sales displays, backlit displays, exhibition graphics and museum graphics.