After the drubbing small webs suffered from long perfectors, Goss is beginning a fight back against B1 long perfectors with a new version of its M600 16pp web press. The new machine uses sheetfed inks to eliminate the need for a dryer and new sheeting technology developed with web offset ancilliaries manufacturer Vits Systems.

If you’re familiar with web presses, think of a web with a sheeter but without a dryer.

If sheetfed is more your bag, and you understand the idea of reel-sheeters, such as Heidelberg’s CutStar, then imagine keeping the reel uncut until just before the delivery, rather than at the feed end, and you have got the idea.

At 30,000 impressions per hour, the M600 is twice the speed of a sheetfed perfector.

Without any firm idea of its economics, it’s hard to see exactly how the machine stacks up, but it would be worth the while for any high-volume sheetfed printer to take a look at while in Düsseldorf, for no other reason than, at twice the speed, it makes it possible to offer a faster turnaround for customers.

Meanwhile, HP has formed its Inkjet High-speed Production Solutions division, and its first product, the HP Inkjet Web Press, provides a challenge to B2 sheetfed machines as well as all the other digital beasts jostling for the transpromo market. It’s size, speed and pricetag are sure to set the cat among the pigeons.

HP has defined the machine in terms of A4 pages per minute and linear metres per minute – 2,600 A4 pages or 122m per minute if you’re interested. But the interesting statistic is how its web width compares with that of a sheetfed press.

At 762mm wide, the HP machine is capable of handling sheets bigger than B2. In fact, as a digital web, there’s no reason to consider its output as portrait format, it could happily produce B1 and some way-out, wider products limited only by your imagination, post-press kit and workflow. But back to that sheetfed analogy: combine the web width with the speed and you get 14,640 B2-plus sheets per hour or 7,126 B1 sheets per hour.

While 7,126 sheets may not sound much of a challenger to a B1 machine, 14,640 certainly is for a B2 unit and, with prices posited at $2.5m (£1.3m) for a twin-engined duplex machine, it’s not far off the price of a fully loaded B2 long perfector. When you factor in the potentially minimal makeready times and much-reduced waste levels, it starts to look like a real contender to offset.

The emergence of this new competition can be regarded as both a blessing and a curse for anyone looking to update their print facility. On the plus side, the alternatives offer the potential to cut costs, improve turnaround times and offer new products. They also force sheetfed suppliers to rise to the challenge with their own innovations.

But on the downside, it makes picking the right press more complicated as those options not only make it possible to steal a march on rivals by picking the machine that better matches your customers’ needs, they also open the unprepared to the risk of getting their sums very wrong and picking a pig rather than a peach.