Technology: 25k investments - Small investments that can have a big impact.

Buying a new piece of kit needn't mean spending hundreds of thousands of pounds. There are plenty of lower-cost options that will give your business added punch in today's tough marketplace.

Take a look at that sum: pounds 25,000. It's a week's wages for some of the Premier League's lesser stars, a life-changing amount of money for many of the fans sitting in the stands. Here on the printing industry pitch, where essential bits of kit routinely require a seven-figure investment, pounds 25k doesn't initially seem like a 'back of the net' amount.

However, as previous PrintWeek articles on the topic of budget bargains have revealed, there's a lot that can be achieved with a - relatively - small amount. In fact, such is the explosion of low-cost gadgetry in this sector, it could be possible to select two or even three extremely useful value-adding items within a pounds 25k budget.

Last month's Northprint show proved a handy showcase for a variety of winning kit in this bracket. Take the new Impress Systems Foil Xpress digital foiling system being distributed by Unibind. This device enables users to produce short-run and variable foiling - it could even be used for proofing differing foiling styles - through the simple expedient of printing directly from a Microsoft Word file. It costs less than pounds 10,000 ex-VAT (pounds 8,495 to be precise) yet its appeal to printers large and small …