One thing to like about Ipex has always been its accessibility: Not the wheelchair ramp I don’t yet need but the ability to understand what exhibitors are going on about. And they you.

GXpress stopped visiting Ipex a while back in favour of newspaper-centric, and wouldn’t be here now but for an alignment of events. And when hunting for relevance resembles the needle/haystack conundrum, any help is welcome.

The absence of most of the majors means that inkjet web is underrepresented at the show, with only a couple of presses in operation. Screen has a dual-engine Truepress Jet 520 at the show and the news that a newspaper-significant 578 mm web width is available, while Fujifilm is printing a variety of work on an updated JetPress 540W web.

A chance then, to check out the fringe possibilities of digital technology, one example of which is the FFEI – for Fujifilm Electronic Imaging, the name of the old Crosfield joint venture – Graphium, currently presented as a digital label press.

Konica Minolta is making a big pitch – at the show and in the marketplace generally – for supremacy in the digital market, but again it’s questionable whether newspapers would be in its sights. Recent inkjet developments are in wideformat textile printing and a printhead for ceramic applications.

Another fringe player is Xeikon, who were once the maker of Agfa’s Chromapress, a first entrant into the digital market and still the maker of their CTP systems.

The company showed its HVT liquid toner digital technology at DRUPA (as Quantum) in 2012. At Ipex, chief executive Wim Maes named transpromo printer TagG Informatique in France as a first beta site for the press, now known as Trillium. Its 1200dpi and 16 grey levels is at the top end of the high-speed digital web market, but whether it has – or will have – any relevance to newspaper publishers will depend on the breadth of product they plan to print.

One point of hope was the prospect of doubling the 60 metres per minute print speed, albeit with a hardware upgrade. The 500 mm wide press is apparently already running and will be seen at the French site by the end of the year, with book and magazine sites in 2015.

As a novelty, you might also want to see the LumeJet S200, a rollfed press for which 200 A4 sheets an hour is claimed. Prints of up to a metre long on the 305 mm wide (photographic) roll are possible.

One of the Coventry-built presses has been around the corner from the ExCel at Docklands agency Altaimage since October 2013. Performance – with solid blacks and difficult Pantone colours – is staggering but no, we’re not suggesting you’ll want to print newspapers on it.

What else? Well Presstek unveiled three “new” CTP plate technologies. One is the waterless Zahara plate for sheetfed and narrow-web applications, which follows a showing of the PearlDry Blue waterless thermal plate at the last DRUPA and testing on KBA’s Cortina at several sites. So far its greatest success has been to bring competition into the market segment.

Presstek also had an aluminum plate designed for inkjet imaging, VIM JT-BL from its VIM Technologies subsidiary. The plate was being imaged on an Epson 3880 printer using standard ink cartridges, and is good for 5000 copies, or up to 20,000 with baking. Now there’s one for the hyperlocal market. Presstek named Ian Pollock as its Asia Pacific channel manager last June.

There’s also a lot of good new inspection and measurement kit at the show, an area in which smartphone app technology can lend convenience and extra functionality.

One such product which has been getting some exposure – perhaps because of its handout picture – is Digital Information’s Bluetooth-linked SpectroPocket, which measures colour patches in conjunction with an Android smartphone or tablet.

The same web and cloud-based functionality is also being added as for the Swiss company’s InkZone Report. With the ability to measure colour “virtually anywhere”, it’s all down to convenience… and accessibility.

Maggie Coleman