A practical printing cylinder was analyzed in the aspect of structural rigidity computation through the BEM. Convergence study of the result was also performed to illustrate the validity and efficiency of the presented method. The free deformation of printing cylinder under gravity was analyzed by BEM with the practical working conditions considered. Results obtained from both of the FEM and BEM were compared. The comparison showed the advantages of BEM for practical structural analysis as boundary only discretization, lower cost of computation and high precision, which presented a new highly accurate method for printing cylinder deformation analysis.