Interesting moment yesterday when I was pinned down by a printer (not literally, though I suppose it could come to that point by the end of the show...) on the KBA stand here at Ipex.

Anyway, said printer, let's call him Peter, posed the following question: "Jo, if I were to write to your Help Line and ask you to tell me which of the B1 presses here has the fastest makeready, what would your answer be?"

A suitably lively and entertaining discussion ensued. But if I were to be giving a serious answer to this question it would most probably be "it depends".

Manufacturers can of course put a stopwatch on their presses, and many of their potential customers will too. In fact this was something that came up while researching a piece for PrintWeek's Technology Report, which has just been published.

Sample comments from users of the latest generation of ultra-fast makeready presses included: "we are achieving five minute makereadies, day-in, day out"; "things we used to do manually in half an hour, the press now does itself in five minutes"; and "the level of productivity means we have been known to gain 12 hours over a 48 hour period".

These latest generation presses are amazingly quick and are really taking the battle back to digital on short runs of non-variable print. A useful reminder, should one be needed, that while digital may dominate at Ipex it definitely doesn't have it all its own way.