Someone once said you can never be thin enough or rich enough. I think it was some cynical celebrity back in those misspent Malibu days. But can that idea ever apply to a digital printing engine, as in wide enough or cheap enough? There are bound to be some folks who reckon that five metres isn't wide enough, and they might even be keen to purchase such a beast, so probably somewhere someone will indeed want to go wider than five metres in the future. It is a question of application and productivity.

Although none of them are likely to be particularly high, there are a number of hurdles to overcome for going wider. It takes considerable expertise to keep a five-metre width moving through an engine consistently and evenly. But the roll-to-roll feeding systems on current generation machines seem to manage the process and one assumes could manage an even wider roll width. The problem of handling the output has also been solved for roll-to-roll engines, so here too there is no reason why the width couldn't be greater.

HP introduced its 5m Scitex XP5500 a couple of months ago – it should be wide enough, but if the market wants wider we expect wider will come

It is probably more a question of market need. If manufacturers think they can make a decent enough return on investment by developing even wider versions of their existing technologies, we can be pretty sure that more will be coming along. They may just be just prototypes with which developers want to test the market but we should probably expect to see something wider than five metres next year. After all, to trial something larger and see what response it gets it isn't such a leap for manufacturers already producing five-metre machines.

The main applications that would benefit from even wider output are obviously those that already benefit from the extra width: billboards, building wraps and suchlike external applications. The argument in their favour, apart from the flexibility one, is that such engines could help to reduce installation costs if sign and display makers could produce even wider output. Alternatively a larger width could be useful for ganged output. And it could also expand the range of applications to include such things as backdrops for theatres.

Wanting bigger is human nature, but whether there is really a need for even wider-format digital printers is not immediately obvious. The market is already crowded and struggling to support the developer community. In these straitened times we should probably focus on faster and brighter, rather than wider.