I had to do a double-take when reading the Product of the Week feature on the EFI Jetrion 4000 in the current issue of PrintWeek.

The Jetrion costs around £300,000, and the alternatives range from the same sort of price up to more than £700,000. With one notable exception, that being the Mimaki CJV30-60 costing just £9,995. Upon first reading I thought that surely a couple of digits were missing from the price. But they aren't.

To me this perfectly illustrates one of the great enabling aspects of digital printing technology today. So much of it is within easy reach now. Little surprise that in the commercial print space there has been so much interest in "light production" machines such as the Xerox 700, Konica Minolta C6501e, Ricoh C900 and Canon's 6000. Nifty finishing kit is also available that costs from a few hundred to a few thousand pounds. Companies can make a relatively modest investment that allows them to get to grips with digital workflow and finishing without, as they say stateside, betting the farm.

While the Mimaki isn't an all-singing, all-dancing UV-cured inkjet it does provide a somewhat less financially stressful way for label printers to explore the market for a digitally printed offering. And let's face it, getting ten grand off the bank nowadays is a little easier than getting thirty or forty times as much.