In the port city of Hamburg - where Axel Springer has a substantial array of inkjet imprinting heads on the Ahrensberg Colormans that print its Bild tabloid - hybrid printing means many things.

But with the world's publishers and press makers gathered for WAN-Ifra's World Publishing Expo, the definition moved ahead a notch.

Apart from Kodak's imaginative Jersey project for wholly-inkjet printing, three major players in the press arena had something to contribute.

Evolving, diversifying KBA discussed its cooperation with HP, which is delivering a new simplex colour inkjet to be unveiled before the end of this year, plus its own digital projects, and says its reorganisation has created the funding and environment to develop a raft of "interesting ideas" it has for this and othr industries. It already has versions of its RotaJet press with web widths up to 2.25 metres.

manroland web talked primarily of workflow, productivity and web-offset market share at its traditional Expo media conference, but showed a slide of a two-tower Colorman E-line with a four-colour inkjet simplex deck of unspecified width. It is also of course, the maker of the high volume digital finishing options for book and newspaper production and a major partner with Kodak in inkjet imprinting.

And Goss International - newly US owned following the AIP acquisition from Shanghai Electric - took the opportunity to announce new modular unwind and rewind units from its Contiweb facility in the Netherlands, although the focus appears more on markets in labels and packaging. Importantly it builds a partnership with HP which may bear further fruit.

At the KBA conference there was a discussion on quality and the issue of "good enough" which - while anathema to the Würzburg engineers - was something News Corp's Raji Narisetti was last month telling the newspaper industry they should be giving more consideration to.

KBA managing director Christophe Muller talked of the need for new business models for printers and publishers not happy with either what they get from print or digital publishing. The union of offset and digital - "and I'm not talking about printheads" - was an imperative for publishers, with particular applications in magazines where returns are a major problem.

The good news appears to be that the web press maker - which now derives much of its revenue from flexo, packaging and special applications - has the funds and the willingness to explore. "I'm not sure that in the 'old world' I would have had the research and development budget needed," he says.

The fully-digital newspaper project at Walliser Bote - another island, this one surrounded by Swiss mountains - is one in which HP's inkjet press and manroland's finishing technology come together (with some mailroom help from Müller Martini).

And there were other inkjet-only projects to talk about in Hamburg: Kodak has several new projects on its order book, not to mention the Australian one I was surprised not to see revealed this week (watch GXpress for details).

There's also a place for hybrid digital-offset, and it was good to see major players starting to come to terms with it.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: Simplex inkjet on the deck of a manroland newspaper press

On our homepage: KBA managing director Chrostophe Müller