Due to my ongoing obsession with the web offset printing business in general I've been following the progress of Goss and its giant 96pp Sunday M5000 press closely. Everyone needs a hobby.

The concept was widely derided by competitors when it was first mooted, and still described as 'not necessary' by some as recently as Ipex. Yet the machine has ticked all the right boxes for a clutch of printers on the continent. The past couple of years have hardly been a boom time for investment in large, expensive web presses but nevertheless Goss has scored sales of the M5000 at Mazzucchelli in Italy, Altair in Spain, and most recently Stark Druck in Germany.

Format-wise one could argue, and Goss obviously does, that 96pp makes far more sense than the 64/72pp models that proved all the rage a few years back among UK web printers. It would be super-interesting to have stats on how many of those 72pp presses actually spend all or most of their time running 64s, for instance.

The M5000's web width is a gravure-esque 2,860mm, but it can run 96pp, two 48s or three 32s (if I remember correctly), which has obvious appeal in terms of product flexibility and section breaks. This, combined with Autoplate plate changing, makes for some pretty peppy productivity and not just in the realm of long runs - at Ipex Goss cited the example of a user who had produced 124 different jobs in a 24 hour period. In short it eats work of a high pagination, [comparatively] short-run variety.

While I am still yearning for a coffee-and-shopping based fact-finding trip to Mazzucchelli in Milan to learn more about this behemoth, I'm also wondering what the chances are that one of these beasts might just appear here on the small island. Shall we start a book? Remember, the wicky wacky world of web is full of surprises.

In the meantime, by way of entertainment here's a couple of pics from Ipex showing the size of the blanket cylinder and plate.