The pair of Avalons will replace two existing Agfa machines: a VLF Xcalibur and a Galileo.

The investment is part of the south London-based firm's move to consolidate all of its production into the Woolwich site.

"The decision to stay with Agfa made sense due to the reliability and quality of the Apogee workflow and Sherpa proofer," said SMP digital production director Mark Turner (pictured left).

SMP's M-Press was installed last month, and Agfa decided to send the machine to the customer rather than bring it to Ipex, although it was represented as a huge graphic along one wall of the firm's stand.

"I wanted a piece of equipment that was like a screen line, but instead of the squeegee there was an ink-jet head and the machine ran at the speed of screen or litho," said Turner.

The installation is the culmination of at least three years of development that followed Agfa putting out a questionnaire to point of sale and poster printers about what they wanted from a digital machine.

"We had a vision of a high-speed UV flatbed with the option of screen specials inline," said Turner. "I was very aggressive to be the beta site."

He added that the M-Press was driven by the same Apogee X workflow as its platesetters. This allows the firm to use the RIP data about ink coverage and plate costs to determine when it is more cost effective to run the job as a litho job or to run it on the M-Press.

The firm has begun to produce commercial work on the M-Press, which SMP demanded have a quality that matched litho or screen when viewed from a metre away to ensure its output doesn't look different to existing products.

Turner was also at the show to look for a 3m-wide flatbed and roll-to-roll digital press.