Back barely in time to get the November print edition to press, I’ve been lucky enough to spend most of a month looking around parts of the industry in Europe (writes Peter Coleman). Between Hinwil, Switzerland – as a guest of Ferag – and the IfraExpo in Vienna, I had the rare privilege of enough time in the UK to take in ‘must see’ sites such as News International’s triple-wide pressroom in Broxbourne, INM’s Goss FPS in Newry, and the world-famous Telegraph Media newsroom. The stories are elsewhere in this issue. Travel broadens the mind, and the month away exposed me to formats and printing processes not currently seen in Australia and New Zealand, and markets in which keen competition keeps publishers sharp. Flexo newspapers and gravure-printed magazine products are a regular part of the UK publication market, the latter widely used for everything from Sunday supplements to upmarket glossies and giveaway magazines. Sometime the gravure quality was patchy: A copy of the ‘Daily Telegraph’ magazine had the characteristic high-density blacks, but also dirty highlight areas, which can be a trademark trait or a printing fault. There’s been no publication gravure in Australia for decades, of course, but that may be set to change with IPMG’s Sydney plans: The big advantage – and one which the Hannan team will have homed in on – is the ability to print high-impact images on lightweight stocks, often of pretty poor quality. On which subject, it’s worth noting that most UK newspapers are printed on 45 gsm newsprint, with a crisp 42.5 gsm much in evidence. And flexo: The KBA Flexo-Courier presses installed at Associated Newspapers’ Harmsworth Quays, London, plant have been extended and were joined in the group by more flexo capacity – this time Italian Cerutti lines – at a centre in Didcot, Oxfordshire commissioned last year. The result is an all-colour ‘Daily Mail’ which, like the afternoon commuter freesheet ‘London Lite’ – the closure of which has been announced – is proudly ‘printed with ink that doesn’t come off on your hands’. The claim is true enough, but hollow solids were frequently a flexo giveaway in editions I saw, although colour quality is otherwise good. In the crowded UK market, the ‘Guardian’ and Sunday ‘Observer’ are distinguished not only by the Berliner format adopted four years ago, but also by careful attention to design and typography, and optimised prepress. While there’s nothing special about the offset print process and manroland presses, this delivers solid blacks and strong colours to maximise the impact of killer photography. And there’s the size: While the ability to stitch five of the six products coming off folders on the triple-wide presses at Newsprinters Broxbourne greatly improves tabloid presentation, the appeal of Berliner is clear for upmarket products. It may still be hard to handle in the confines of an Easyjet seat, but the mini-broadsheet size would doubtless please former Fairfax chief executive David Kirk. The ‘Observer’ I picked up for the flight to Vienna was all these things and more... a B5-sized booklet of children’s stories – presumably been printed coldset on the Guardian presses – made a persuasive case for the high-speed folding technology Ferag had been showing only days before. This is further reinforcement that heatset is not the only way to go for ‘value-added’ newspaper supplements. At Ifra, manroland was handing out copies of a supplement printed on an 80 gsm stock by its local Augsburg customer (a coldset Colorman running at normal production speeds).