Kodak is promising great things for its Prosper inkjet press. When it comes to the jam tomorrow assurances emanating from the company's management, Prosper is a high fruit content luxe strawberry preserve.

Unfortunately, its Q2 results last week revealed that the company has experienced something of a sticky patch commercialising the product.

A $32m fall in gross profit at Kodak's Graphic Communication Group was primarily down to additional Prosper-based costs, because it seems the folks at Kodak hadn't fully appreciated the details of the sort of clean room conditions Prosper requires to work properly, and also the fact that users want to, err, print onto all sorts of different substrates.

Chairman and chief executive Antonio Perez wins a special prize for understatement of the year for saying "it's unfortunate that we didn't figure that out before".

Yes, a $32m hit is indeed pretty unfortunate. Especially considering the Stream inkjet technology used in Prosper was first shown way back at Drupa 2004 so one might imagine there has been plenty of time to get to grips with any vagaries.

I have a top tip for Perez. He should get on the blower (or, more likely, get a minion on the blower) to John Hornby at Lettershop group. Hornby and his team have created their own bespoke system using Stream heads, it works, it doesn't require lab conditions and they can print onto all sorts of normal commercial stocks.

I'm sure for a reasonable fee - 10% of that $32m would be a bargain - John could provide the sort of information that would help Kodak 'preserve' some profits.