At last, the press office here has woken up and the Wi-Fi seems to be working most of the time. The show is clearly smaller than four years ago and there are noticeably less people milling around the halls. But despite this there is a definite buzz about the show. I’m tempted to say that this is down to the newer digital machines, and while it’s clear that digital is far more dominant here than the last time around, there is also a lot of interest around the conventional printing halls.

It is becoming obvious that while digital printing is undoubtedy going to eclipse conventional technology in the near future, we are not going to see a sudden switch from offset to inkjet, in the way that, for example, the professional photography market moved from film to digital in the space of just a couple of years.
None of the high speed inkjet press vendors that I’ve spoken to so far have managed to come up with anything close to realistic costs for buying and running their inkjet presses. The Screen JetPress SX, for example, costs £1.24 million, which is double the cost of a Xerox iGen4, yet it runs at 108ppm as against the iGen’s 120ppm. But Screen has yet to decide on the cost of the inks. Brian Filler, managing director of Screen UK, claims that the print quality will be the driving factor, and though the print quality is very good, the ink costs will have to be significantly lower than the electrophotographic alternatives to make a difference.