Photosensitive cylinders are used in printing arts and more particularly in electrophotographic printing (e.g. xerographic copy). The photosensitive coating is applied to the cylinder in liquid form, before it is solidified. The liquid is applied to the cylinder through a needle applicator that translates along the direction of the cylinder axis. The cylinder rotates during this process in order to cover the entire surface. Therefore, the liquid is applied in a spiral pattern. In order to help spreading of the liquid over the cylinder surface and to improve the thickness uniformity, each liquid stream applied from the needle passes under a flexible blade. This process leads to a coating that presents a spiral pattern on the deposited layer thickness, which can cause defects on the electrophotographic process. The complete understanding of the flow is vital to the optimization of the process. A theoretical model of the thin film flow over the surface of a rotating cylinder is presented here. It is based on the lubrication approximation considering a thin precursor film in front of the apparent contact line. The resulting non-linear fourth-order PDE for the film thickness was solved by a second-order finite difference method. The time discretization was done by the implicit Crank-Nicholson scheme. The non-linear algebraic equation at each time step was solved by Newton’s method. The results show how the uniformity of the deposited layer varies with process parameters and liquid properties.