However, it also urged printers to take a considered approach to rival inkjet products launched at the show.

"Many announcements are built on aspiration, for what people want to have, not what they have today," president of production systems Quincy Allen said.

Allen revealed a raft of developments to the firm's range of presses, workflow and business development tools – including a new flagship colour machine, the iGen4, and a new entry-level machine, the Xerox 700 Digital Color Press.

However, Steve Hooper, vice president of Xerox Research Center Webster, spoke about details of the firm's inkjet developments.

"The challenge for inkjet is to solve a paradox," Hooper said. "We took the challenge to answer the paradox of needing a thin ink to pass through the nozzles of the printhead and to be viscous on contact with paper."

Xerox's solution is a UV-cured gel ink based on the solid ink used in its office products.

The ink is heated to reduce its viscosity when in the printhead and then cools to become a gel by the time it hits the substrate. Finally, for added robustness, it is UV-cured. The ink works on almost any substrate. Xerox demonstrated examples on paper, plastic and metal.

The firm has developed its own printhead technology and in its labs has a 508mm-wide four-colour web press running at 133m per minute. Hooper added he believes the process can be scaled to wider widths, higher speeds and for more colours.

Xerox has not set a date to commercialise gel ink, but Allen said: "The invention has been done; we're working on robustness and latitude".

Chairman Anne Mulcahy added that the firm's solid ink technology might appear in production machines.

"We're taking solid ink up-market in the more near-term than gel ink," she said.