As printers, we all rely to some extent on our equipment manufacturers’ research and development teams for our costs savings, quality enhancements and growing profits. Sure, we can sell better, we can improve our processes to make them more efficient, we can hire and train more talented staff, and so on, but we still expect the account manager from our equipment vendor to turn up once or twice a year with an enhancement that is going to trim a few more minutes off our makeready times or give us even higher dot quality.

Barrel based ink - what a stupid idea...? Ok it might save "manpower" on continuous runs but useless for the ever changing ink make-up uncoated fsc etc. And when a problem arises Technotrans will be take forever (as they always do) to come out and diagnose problem... !

Dont want to just diagree with you (above), but theink system isnt just about manpower, its about keeping costs down, and keeping YOU in the job, inks have come a long way with regards to different stocks of paper, we run at present a heidelberg XL 12 colour, XL 5 colour, and a 102 12 colour all with cutstar using heidelbergs XL process inks, 1st you might think i just justified what you said with long runs by mentioning cutstar, but we run jobs from 100 to 1.5 mllion sheet runs, and on all sorts of stock, the barreled ink is a saviour!! has no problems with uncoated, fsc, or any other stock, whilst initially waiting on te installation we were running on tins, what a nightmare, even with all assistants and minders the ink was still catching us out, i think anyprinter would definately appreciate the ink line system, and is well worth the investment just to hijack tis thread a little, i reallythink people should start forgetting about labelling cutstar purely for long run work, reels can be bought in speciically for jobs at a much lower price, and is truy a great product, it really is the best thing since sliced bread for printers! (as is the amazing heidelbeg xl machiey!)