Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes we in print would do well to remember this.

I started thinking about this topic after hearing somebody scoff about the colour quality produced by Riso's ComColor inkjet printer, a machine that will be one of my personal "must sees" at Ipex.

Certainly the ComColor's output is not on a par with offset, the colour is a bit flat and the machine has some limitations - its print area does not extend to allow bleed over the entire sheet size, for example - so it is a mystery to me why the samples produced at its launch in the USA seemed designed to highlight that fact.

However, its capabilities are going to be more than adequate for heaps of print applications, some of which are probably not even colour at the moment. And the cost per page is cheap as chips.

The other day I returned home to find a leaflet from the local Labour Party on my doormat. It seems there's an election on the way. This leaflet, printed in black and spot red, and with the most awful rendering of pictures using coarse halftone tints, is of such abysmal quality that I cannot comprehend why they even considered including images in it. I imagine it was produced on an ancient duplicator. Soon after it was followed into my letterbox by a similar missive from the Green Party, this time printed with some sort of inkjet. It looks professional and has nice full colour images of the candidates that are actually recognisable.

Chatting to the Riso team the other week about the ComColor's launch, it emerged that when they're doing demonstrations prospective buyers from the print sector will often get their linen testers out and start peering at the dots. Put them away chaps! They aren't pitching it as graphics quality. Rather than questioning the minutiae of the dot structure, surely the more important question is "can you sell this?".