Adapt or die could well be the byword of WRH Global, one of very, very few directly newsmedia-related vendors at the PacPrint trade show, which opened in Melbourne today.

One of its Darwinian adaptations is Skyfall, a railway system which delivers plates to presses using that phenomena of gravity, quantified by my famous forebear Isaac Newton.

Or it will deliver parts or products for manufacturing and distribution businesses, buffering and marshalling them in a manner evocative of the radial wires along which cash and change were catapulted in 1950s department stores... or the little train which carries trays around the works restaurant in Hinwil, Switzerland, of WRH's best-known brand, Ferag, for that matter.

One way or another, PacPrint is all about adaptation, and most of the "survivor" companies which are exhibiting have adapted to provide the products and processes the market wants, shuffling off the ones it doesn't.

The 'Print' of the show's name is almost exclusively digital, with the biggest exhibitors the likes of Fuji Xerox - built on the toner-based xerography of its name - and HP, which added Benny Landa's Indigo adaptation to its own inkjet iterations. Incredibly perhaps, Heidelberg isn't here,

That it's the Victorian minister for energy, environment and climate change, Lily D'Ambrosio, who opened the show is recognition of another adaptation, the "printable" solar energy panels which have their first public demonstration on the lawn here. Even if they were developed "across the border" in New South Wales, the child of the University of Newcastle's Paul Dastoor and its PRCOE organic electronics research unit.

There's a wistful note however, in D'Ambrosio's comment that the project's innovative energy technologies are the sort that could be developed in Victoria "with the right support".

Inkjet is everywhere in the exhibition hall still fondly known as 'Jeff's Shed', and comes in all sizes from broadest billboard to narrow-web applications for label printing.

But no inkjet web scaled for digital newspaper printing, so far as I have seen, forced out by the space demands of the systems printers are clamouring to buy. In any case, the system over which newspaper printers procrastinate might suffer the same fate as the Mercury single-width newspaper press Heidelberg once brought to the show in a fit of misplaced optimism. It stood in a warehouse for months afterwards, before being shipped back overseas.

manroland web - which makes the most viable system for finishing digitally-printed newspapers - is among those former PacPrint regulars of the news industry missing from this year's show, as are KBA and Goss International. And if they were here, no doubt it would be to spruik their important new strengths in the lively market for packaging print which forms the show's other main element.

Some 12,000 print industry professionals are expected to attend PacPrint, which continues to Friday... to be inspired, speculate, network, and for the industry's gala National Print Awards dinner on Thursday night.

And to enjoy the other attractions of Australia's "shopping capital", including those of the Crown casino across the road from the show. Who knows, some - especially in newsmedia - might get a better return on their money.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: Aiming for the sun - Professor Dastoor's solar panels are made by printing electronic ink onto thin laminated sheets using conventional printing presses