Putting aside Communisis' results for a moment (in summary: horrible year, no surprise that Blundell et al have shoved everything possible into the last period that took place under Vaughan's watch), I did utter an audible "oooh" when I saw that the group has bought an HP inkjet web.

Regular readers will recall that this piece of kit, which I must get used to calling the HP T300, was one of the must-see items at Drupa 2008. CPI was due to have installed a book printing version here last year, but instead the kit ended up going to one of its French facilities. This was terribly disappointing as I was so looking forward to seeing it in its full-blown commercial guise here in the UK.

Now Communisis has quietly installed one at its Leeds DM site, and the group says it will be producing live customer work in April. Oooh.

In securing this sale, HP really has parked its tanks firmly on Kodak's lawn. They must be spitting feathers in Dayton. Communisis is a long-standing user of Kodak's Versamark heads for personalising work on its conventional web presses, and would surely have been on Kodak's target list of customers for the Prosper inkjet system. As with the installation at Rotomail parent Rotolitho Lombardi in Italy, referenced by our esteemed columnist Andrew Tribute here, it's clear that HP is all over Kodak's customer base like a rash. Kodak has some Prosper imprinting heads installed, including a beta site for the mono version at Lettershop in Leeds, but commercialisation of the full blown press is still "upcoming".

In the race to market for the sort of inkjet printing technology that is billed as "changing print forever", HP is establishing a significant lead.