Old School

Hi All,
i have operated heidelbergs for nearly 20 years now, i am toying with the idea of setting up un my own with a GTO 52 single colour to start off with. My first concern is plates. where i am currently working we have an all singing and dancing CTP prossesor which cost about £70k, im looking at setting up with only about £25 all in. i recently was living in australia working for a small firm who still made some metal negative plates on a parker vacuum frame, but the used a local bureau to play out the neg film. does anyone know if there is a small destop printer capable of producing negs as the old plates last forever if gummed up well enough. this seems to me one of the cheapest ways of making good quality plates..

opinions greatly appreciated..
regards
printmate

 

Hi,

Have you looked at the poly platesetter type of system such as the Esko DPX? You can get them secondhand for a tenth or twentieth of their new price now and my experience of them is that they are brilliant.

Probably teaching a granny to suck eggs now, but they produce what look like silvermaster plates with one vital difference ... they're NOT silvermaster plates. They are high-resolution (175 line screen capable - no, really!), punched and press-ready. They're not metal but the really do work just as well on runs upto about 20k. If the run is longer, just make 2 plates - they come out ready punched and everything so changing them is easy. You could probably find one of these machines for £5k. Spend the rest of that £25 on a 2 colour GTO52 and a guillotine and you're up & running.

I think I have exhausted all avenues with making film on printers and the only one out there that works at all is the Xante Filmaker. It's ok if you don't do much halftone work or close register stuff but I wouldn't buy one new in favour of a 2nd hand DPX.

I assume you plan to work for yourself, by yourself to start with? Then space will be an issue. DPX has a similar footprint to an Agfa Accuset imagesetter - about 3' x 4' (I guess). But that's your entire platemaking department. No imagesetter, processor, printdown frame or assembly area.

I was dubious of these machines when I first started with them but they truly are the best option (in my humble opinion) for the small offset crowd. You can tell it to make plates just before you go home at the end of the day and they'll be ready and waiting for you in the morning. Consider the time savings we made with ours. We used to have to make film, punch, assemble, and hand develop pres-sen plates for, say, a 2 colour, 52pp a5 booklet, 4up 1/2 sheetwork impo and run 1,000 of them. Hardly worth doing after you've spent a day just making the plates, is it? Nowadays we drop a postscript file (which is the same info you'd supply to an imagesetter or desktop printer) into a special folder on the computer at 4.30pm and then we go home and leave the DPX to sort it out for us.

Oh, one other thing ... the machine can produce plates so rapidly that other small-offset printers in the area have got word of it and are ditching the in house platemaking in favour of buying plates from us. We can sell plates to them cheaper than they can make metal ones for.

I probably sound like a poly-platesetter salesman but I promise I'm not. I'm a printer who is currently taking over the family business which my father established about 25 years ago, so I remember the good old days of producing negs on a process camera and spotting them out etc. I can't believe we ever made any money doing it that way!

 

Here is the link for XANTE showing the polyester platemakers and various other supplies.

Some advice. If youre starting up alone and dont have someone dedicated to make your negs id forget the older conventional route, you'll be there for hours. Remember you cant replace time.

Fifteen years ago i looked into this area for a friend which had the camera/neg/plates system. Although rather than looking at Xante i found an HP A3+ laser printer that could output polyester plates. The Hp was then £1000 compared to £3-4000 for the Xante. Now polyester plates are ok for cheap quick short run stuff. But you could go halfway by outputting on transparency film and then exposing to a positive metal plate for longer runs.

edit..... just checked out and you'd probably require something like an HP5200 sized laser printer to produce film only . For plates then you'd have to buy a dedicated printer which i guess would be a lot more money.

Hope this helps

Dave

 

The above recommendations are good, but, it sounds like you are on a very tight budget to get started. I would also recommend that you look at a used Linotronic 330 and a small processor. In todays environment, they are very inexpensive, easy to operate, quality is superior ( 2540-150) should be more than you need on a GTO. It would be great to have a CTP on startup but, if you are looking for a good quality machine at low cost you need to explore this route also. Add an inexpensive AGFA processor and your set for alot less than most other avenues. It all depends on how much you want to spend.

 

i was in this same situation a few years ago. Tried allsorts, but ended up with metal posi plates a second hand countess printdown frame (or similiar) and a postscript laser printer. And i still use them to this day. Make sure you get the correct posi film, and sometimes i expose with 2 sheets for running solid colours. Cheapest, last the longest and you can get a few quid back after youve built up a pile of dated ones(plates). It also save alot of money on chemicals as you only need the posi plate developer

 

Plotter isn't wrong; I use the same equipment daily ... Xante Filmaker, NuArc flip-top and posi plates. They do last the longest but you will be disappointed with the quality of halftones (regardless of how well you calibrate it), the whole process is time consuming and takes up a lot of space. I only use it for forms and text etc.

I reckon you could find a poly-platesetter for similar money to what it would cost to buy a print-down frame and Xante laser and it means you (in effect) instantly have another member of staff, who is happy to work through the night if you wish.

I get all my process and close-register plates made for my by my old chums at a place I used to work at. Their plates are made on an Esko DPX which makes press-ready, punched plates at 150lpi. The quality of the resulting printed image is as good as anyone can get on any press ... even CMYK in 4 passes is easy.

Don't get me wrong, I love aluminium plates and prefer to use them where I can because a lot of my work will be re-run at a later date, but I hate spending 25 minutes making a plate for a job that's only going to be on press for 30 minutes.

I saw a DPX-type poly platesetter sell on eBay this week for £461. I should have had it ...

 

my halftones are as sharp as hell, i use a xerox 6130, with the film i get from swansea offset. The printer is colour, but its the only one in this range that you can print black only, even if all the other toners are depleated, and is postscript. Also the toners arnt like the old laser printers, they have the silicone mixed into them, not the dry black and white copier toners, Which seems to help and give nice dense clear halftones.

 

Yep, I've gone over to a more modern laser now too and the difference is like chalk & cheese. Nearly imagesetter-grade.

 

if you hear of any more dpx s going cheap, please let me know. Just looking at one sold on fleabay for £950. Do these go wrong very often, do i need one with a service contract on???? i know nothing about these but look pretty good and dont need too much chemicals in them like some of the expensive imagesetters-platesetters

 

Yeah the don't seem to come along that often. The one I'm most familiar with is the Esko Graphics one that looks like two black cubes have intersected each other. The image they produce is fantastic but the media is nowhere near as stable as metal plates. Perfect for a single or 2c press but I'd avoid it on a 4c press because it can be near impossible to get all the plates to fit each other due to stretch. The one I used to use NEVER broke down in the 4 years I used it but it was cleaned every week and had it's own room, away from the presses, dust etc. so it's environment probably enhanced it's reliability.

To me, £950 seems like a good price if it's ready to plug & play and comes with the RIP-PC, chemicals and media. Double check which press it's set up for because the plates come out ready to go ie punched, and cut to size. I imagine they can be changed to a different plate size but we had a QM-46 and 2 GTOs, so it's twin-roll ability meant we got it set up from new and never changed it.

It would happily produce a 150-line screen at 2540dpi and each plate only took a few minutes to come out once it was warmed up. Oh, that was the other tip ... we left it switched on all the time and sent a load of plates to it each evening just before going home so they were ready and waiting in the morning.

 

i just recieved a sample of these double sided polyester plates that go through the copier. anyone have opinions on these. Once i try them ill let you know what i think. looks good though and should save a few bob on films for general jobbing jobs