A £1.5m press hall extension at the Ipswich Star is two weeks ahead of schedule.

The new tower, which will help transform the look of the Star and 26 other local papers, will double the colour capacity to 32 pages.

Work on the building is now complete and the press tower itself will arrive in two sections and take two months to construct and integrate with the existing press.

Star photographers already work with digital cameras and the changes will improve the way their pictures are presented.

Senior production manager Graham Wells said: "It doesn't look that impressive here at the moment but there's been a lot of work done there - it took a lot of time to prepare for the arrival of the press tower."

The printing tower will be supplied by Goss Graphics of Preston, which owns the French firm Creusot Loire, which supplied and installed the original press in 1982.

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